My story begins a few days back when I was checking with my dear Twitter following on their favorite mail apps on Android. I got back a few great apps but the one I went for somehow stood out of the crowd with all its freshness and value-adding features. Today I want to talk about Missive.
Missive is an exciting mail app, but it’s much more than that. It’s a team-focused productivity and collaboration solution, and while you can use it on your own without issues, its real value unfolds when using it with multiple accounts, teams, and even organizations. You only need to use one main “Missive account” that will store all entered mail account credentials. Really time-saving and a very welcome feature in my books.
I thought it’s a bad name, but actually, it isn’t
When I heard the app name Missive at first, I couldn’t help myself but think of “missing” as in “missing emails.” I thought this was such a bad name for such a great solution. Yet, this might have been only to the fact that I am not a native English speaker. I looked the term up and found out that it’s a humorous definition for something like “a letter, especially a long or official one.” So, no problems here. It was my own fault for not knowing that term. The more you know… right? 🙂
As soon as you begin to set up your accounts and configure the app, you notice that there is something different here. Everything seems easier to set up and it’s a little bit exciting to get started. I was also thrilled to find out that it’s not just another Android app. The Missive team built not only for a single platform but for all kinds of operating systems, and it looks just beautiful.
Run it on many different types of OS
You can run Missive on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or… hold onto your chairs… you can use Missive in your web browser without losing any functionality whatsoever. At least I didn’t miss anything so far. A little while after you created your account, you get a warm welcome message from the Missive CEO, who is checking in with you and offering help, in case you have any usage troubles. I liked it and directly reached out and gave a little feedback. Very friendly folks work there at Missive.
So, let’s talk features, shall we? While Missive does offer some premium features that you have to pay for, you can get heaps of stuff done even only with the free features. You easily connect services such as Gmail / G Suite, Office 365 / Outlook.com, iCloud, Twilio SMS, Facebook Messenger, and even Twitter (I think I never saw this feature anywhere else before). That enable the tool to be a good help even for social media comms. It goes without saying, that you can also connect your email accounts via IMAP.
More features for productivity and team collaboration
You can efficiently manage multiple accounts in Missive and specify signatures and mail rules as well. Even as a free user you can also prepare “canned messages” into a “responses” function, so you can later provide standard replies to standard inquiries. You don’t have to use that every day, but you can think of it as a more advanced function than just doing copy-paste on the text that you stored somewhere for this purpose.
Working with a remote team? You might also like this article: Why and How to Work with Virtual Teams?
I was talking about productivity and team collaboration features before, and there is more to report on that. You can for instance leverage mail rules to auto-assign emails with particular keywords to the subject matter experts of a specific field in your team. Even if there is no match or you just don’t choose to go for automation rules, you can always assign people on emails manually. Not sure how that can work out? No worries, you can have private conversations on an email as well so you can collaborate to create a perfect reply.
A similar function with a little different purpose are the shared labels. Whenever it makes sense, you can stick a label on a particular piece of communication and categorize it like this not only for yourself but for all in your team to see. Next to those, you also have features like read receipts, send later, mail snooze, pinned conversations and API interfaces. I am also a huge fan of the swiping feature which makes most fun on smartphones.
Swiping and zero inbox happiness
You can define the swipe configuration yourself to match your work style but not only as far as function assignments go, but even on the “swipe-length.” This is a bit hard to imagine, but I can give you an example. For instance, I set my swipe-left up to delete mail items, but if I swipe it all the way through, to the edge of the screen, it activates the spam function instead of only deleting the mail.
Want to collaborate on a higher level? You might like this article: The One Thing That Enables True Collaboration
I found Missive to be not only very enjoyable to use and simple, but it was also a huge productivity boost when comparing it to the way I handled my emails before that. You can efficiently process your inbox to zero in a few clicks or taps. I don’t know about you, but empty inboxes make me happy. Of course, nothing get’s deleted, you just store the historic mail items in the archive, and if you use the search function, you can quickly find everything if you need it again.
Grab it for free
They have a lot more than that to offer and whether your an individual, a team, a startup, an SMB or maybe even an enterprise, check Missive out and give them a go. You can find out more about all their features on their website and download it there, or just go to your favorite app store and grab it there. No more stress. Go for Missive. Be happy.
YouTube: Missive Overview
Photo credit: All the image material has been provided to us by Missive for press usage.
Editorial notice: The author has tested this mail software for longer than a week, managing emails from various accounts and services.
