We’re looking at ways of resolving this, short of re-incorporating in the US, but these fees might be here to stay.  We’re not trying to mislead anyone when we state the pricing for Mailmanagr is $7 per month if you choose to go the paid route.  That is actually what we’re charging.  The extra $2 fee came as a surprise to us too!

We’ll update this as we learn more, but as of now, it seems that only Visa and MasterCard are charging these fees (American Express appears to not charge anything extra).

If you want to assign an item to a person, you set up an alias for that person in the “People” tab.  You then put that alias in parentheses in the subject line of the message:

Subject: (jon) Create a blog post about Mailmanagr syntax

We wanted to keep it simple so that people using mobile devices wouldn’t have to hunt around for bizarre characters or do something ominous.  We made it too simple though.  People use parentheses all the time:

Subject: Revise that blog entry (it’s just too wordy)

Mailmanagr thinks I’m trying to assign this task to “it’s just too wordy”, and throws an error.  That’s not acceptable.  Additionally, we’re still supporting really old syntax where assignments in the body of the message can be made as well.

We need to simplify things, so we’re going to make a few tweaks:

• Assigning messages, todos & milestones — double up on the parentheses.  So instead of (jon), put in ((jon)).  That’s far less common, and should cause far less problems.  You can still use a list to notify multiple people ((jon, dave, phil)).
• Assigning messages, todos & milestones — we’re dropping support for notifications in the body of the message.  Only subject line notifications will be supported.
• Use /private/ in the subject of the message to mark something private.  This works for Messages, Milestones & Todos.  (ppp support is going away).
• Use @Oct 12 2011@ to indicate a due date in the subject line for Milestones and Todos (yes, we’re adding due date support for todos with this update)

If you’ve got any auto-notifiers set up, please take a minute to update your code/notifications.  We’ll be rolling out these changes Monday, December 6th, 2010.  If you have any concerns, need more time, or have any comments, please drop us a line at info@industryinteractive.net.  With these updates, we’ll be done most of our housekeeping, and rolling out a fun new feature for folks.  Watch for more about that!

We’ve got quite a few changes in the pipe including a number of “improvements” and maybe even a new feature or two.  Stay tuned.

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Was showing up in Basecamp as:

Item 1Item 2Item 3

and

Item 1

Item 2

Item 3

Was showing up as:

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

The only trick is that we haven’t touched the code that handles line breaks in HTML e-mail messages.  We did a little testing, and it seems to be another strange and wonderful feature of Apple Mail (or Mail.app).  I’m not being an Apple hater here, I love my Mac and use Mail.app as my mail client of choice, but man they do weird things sometimes. (ref. http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=line+breaks+apple+mail)

So we’ve started checking to see if this line break problem exists in the HTML version of a message, and if it does, we boot the message back to using plain text.  Hope that resolves some headaches for a few folks.

We pulled a backup of the server from 7:30 AM PST this morning and restored it.  Looks like that fixed the problem, everything is back to normal.

There was some downtime though (looks like about three quarters of an hour in total).  Because e-mail “queues” when it can’t be delivered, we don’t believe that there was any data loss (if you think otherwise, please get in touch).  If the downtime caused you any hardship, please do let us know and we’ll do what we can to make things right.

We’re very sorry for the trouble.  If you need to get in contact with us, please feel free to do so at info@industryinteractive.net

1. In your authorized senders list, you can now enter Basecamp authorization tokens on an address-by-address basis:
   
2. Or you can update your current addresses to use different Basecamp tokens (it will default to using the Basecamp token from your Mailmanagr account, so you don’t HAVE TO do this if you want Mailmanagr to just keep working as it always has).
   

Sending a message to “test@mailmanagr.com” from “info@industryinteractive.net” will post the message to Basecamp as my “Mailmanagr” account.  Sending a message to “test@mailmanagr.com” from “jonathan@industryinteractive.net” will post the message as my own personal account in Basecamp.

The best setup would be to hook Mailmanagr up using one of your administrator accounts in Basecamp (that way, Mailmanagr will have access to post to all projects).  Then, get your team mates to e-mail you their Basecamp tokens as well as any addresses they’d like added to the authorized senders list.

If you are experiencing trouble (messages not getting posted) after setting up your 37signals ID, please log in to the web interface for Mailmanagr and update your Basecamp account settings.  You should only need to do this if your username and/or password has changed with the transition to 37signals ID accounts.

If you’ve tried that, and are still having trouble, please get in touch.  We’re here to help!

Luckily, the removal process is very straightforward.  We’ve submitted our removal request, and everything should be updated in a half hour or so.

This list would have only affected outgoing mail (bounce messages, account sign-up messages, lost password messages), not incoming messages.  So if you’ve tried to sign up for Mailmanagr, or requested a password reminder in the last few days and haven’t received a message, try again tonight.

You can now force  the plain text version of a message, on an address by address basis.  We built in a tweak a while ago allowing you to use “Ptext:” in the subject line of a message to force Mailmanagr to ignore any HTML formatting.  That’s great for single messages here and there, but if you’re having problems getting your mail client to play nice with Mailmanagr, you might need to force the issue.

This feature is free for everyone, so enjoy.

Why on earth would you want to do that?

Some folks have asked for the ability so that they can use Basecamp to handle requests from their customers and web sites.  There are cases where it’s impossible to know where all of your mail is going to come from, or the potential authorized senders list is just too big, this new feature will let you work around that.

Just bear in mind that you might receive proposals from Nigerian political officials in your Basecamp projects.  You’ve been warned.

So, with this announcement comes a couple of notes:

1. We don’t filter spam.  If you create an open address in Mailmanagr, and post it on a public web site, expect to get junk mail.  If you’re concerned about who can add content to your Basecamp projects, this feature probably isn’t for you.
2. This is a paid-account-only feature.  Sorry.  We try to look at features in terms of the resources needed to support them.  This could generate significantly more traffic to our mail servers.
3. If things go absolutely insane, and the mail volume spikes to a crazy level, we might have to rein things in on an account-by-account basis.  We’re not going to be prudish about it, but please think twice before doing something that is going to result in thousands of messages per minute.

So here’s a few tips, if you’re considering using this new feature, but you aren’t sure about how to keep things somewhat secure.  They aren’t requirements, but they are ideas you might want to consider:

1. If you’re going to post one of these addresses for customers to use, do it on a client portal; somewhere that is password-protected.
2. Build a contact form for your web site, and have that send the message through Mailmanagr, instead of posting the address out in the open.
3. Make the addresses hard to guess.
4. Feel free to change your addresses up on occasion if you do start receiving spam.

With that, enjoy!  As always, we’d love to hear from you about any ideas, problems or concerns you might have.