We're happy Fastmail email users, and can almost live with email for support, and barely use any Zendesk features other than assignments, internal notes, and various views. But those three simple ZD features we do use are critical.
Answer: we've definitely talked about how it would be great as a lightweight client management system for a freelancer or consulting firm. We're definitely looking ahead to possible integrations, too!
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From myself - we talk a lot about "teams" with Topicbox, but it's really any group of poeple who share a common interest or responsibility. One market we've identified is homeowners' associations or "body corporates" as they're often called here in Australia. They have membership turnover as people buy and sell, and they have long running projects with a need to keep history. Finally, they consist of people who use different mail services, because unlike a business where everyone is on the same solution, a set of homeowners share nothing other than the locality in which they live. So a heterogeneous system like Topicbox with archivable topics and searchable history is ideal.
personally i think mailing-list is the most important communication tool for team work, and i think more organization need to use them
sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...
Not that I am campaigning against Topicbox, but I think it's worth making clear that just because your email is hosted on Exchange, doesn't mean your mailing list solution needs to be.
You can run, and I have in fact run, mailinglists on top of Mailman / Debian / Postfix / Nginx, in a heterogenous environment where the mailservers were Exchange (and some shitty hosted Exchange run by morons to boot). You can do it without even reconfiguring Exchange if you are willing to put all the lists in a subdomain with its own MX record.
No reason why a hosted solution couldn't work this way as well. If you don't want to have your mailinglists in a subdomain, then you would need mailserver configuration to set up the aliases correctly, and that creates a certain amount of maintenance hassle every time you create a new list, but I've never been convinced that's a worthwhile tradeoff to make. Making mailinglists instantly discernible from humans' addresses isn't necessarily bad.
PMs unwittingly take all these roles today, but these tools will surely unlock further specialization.
Some of it was done, very satisfyingly; some of it we didn't get around to trying. Then the dotcom meltdown happened.
But fundamentally it seems to have many of the same features that Mailman et al have had for decades.
Good on them if they can make mailinglist archives great again, though. I think they're an underappreciated resource, and maybe a slick interface and some rebranding is just what they need.
https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/
and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.
[Fastmail] Services have been restored. The problem was a a network peering issue, leading to our services being unavailable to parts of the internet. We're working with our network provider to understand what happened and what improvements we can make in the future. Thank you for your patience.
An 1hr15mins of connectivity issues is quite significant imo.
Wary after the Imgix several hours of 500/504 disaster and still no technical post-mortem..
Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.
I don't even use Fastmail any longer, great though it is, because I have had to cut my costs absolutely to the bone in recent years. But I'm truly glad such an excellent service exists for if/when I'm again ready to pay for it, and that the engineers involved can get paid for doing a good job.
It's also for Enterprise, which typically has a higher price tag.
