Hello HN!
I wanted to share something we at Good Enough (https://goodenough.us) built over the past year:
Jelly! https://letsjelly.com
Jelly is a simpler shared inbox for small teams (like us) to answer team email. We had just been sharing a login to Fastmail previously, but as email started getting busier, that really started to stink as a solution — no one knew who was going to answer what, if someone else saw an email or not, etc etc. And a Google Group would prove to be worse, as replies too easily got lost to personal inboxes if someone accidentally didn’t “Reply All”. It wasn’t great!
We went looking for a tool to solve these problems, but everything we found was way too much software, and really quite expensive charging per seat. We didn’t need a complex ticketing system. We just needed email, as a team, in a simple and sane way.
So we built Jelly! And we’re not charging per seat, so you can bring your whole team for a very affordable price. (As a quick comparison for our team of six: Jelly’s lowest tier costs just $29/month while Zendesk’s costs upwards of $330/month.)
We would love to hear thoughts from anyone on a small team that needs to handle shared email. Also, if you know of other teams in that same position, we’d appreciate you letting them know about Jelly. Thank you!
But once the messages end up in your personal inbox, it's pretty hard for the other people you are collaborating with (or your family in the scenario here) to participate in the rest of conversation, unless you're willing to be extremely diligent with Cc/Bcc-ing.
It's also certainly possible to use things like labels or messages-left-in-draft to try and avoid stepping on each other's toes and coordinate responses. But again, you've got to be diligent.
What Jelly aims to do is make it _easy_ for non-technical people (and technical people who want something that "just works") to share email smoothly, without having to build the rules themselves or make sure everyone sticks to the system to keep it working well.