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).

(This is the old format of posting milestones and may be deprecated in the future.  You’ve been warned!)

• To create a milestone without comments you put the date in the subject line and the milestone in the message.
• A number of date formats should work just fine, if we can’t figure out a legit date, we’ll post your milestone to January 1, 1960 (it’ll float to the top of your list that way).

CHECKED “With Comments” box:

@October 3, 2010@

• Create a message with the date and subject in the subject line ex: “@Oct 5 2012@ You better be done this project!”

All Milestones:

((nickname))

• This will result in a milestone assigned to the person who is setup under People with that nickname (this can be a person or a company)
• You cannot set a milestone assigned to multiple people

Todo lists (“With comments” is unchecked):

/private/

• This will make this todo list private

Todo items (“With Comments” box is checked):

((nickname))

• This will result in a task assigned to the person who is setup under People with that nickname (this can be a person or a company)
• You cannot set a task assigned to multiple people

@October 3, 2010@

• This allows you to set a todo date on the item
• “October 3, 2010″ will work, so will the abbreviated “Oct 3, 2010″

You can combine the assignment and the due date commands to create a task for someone due on a certain date.

((nickname))

• This will result in a message to the person who is setup under People with that nickname (this could be a person or a company) – setting a company will notify everyone in the company in Basecamp
• You can send a message to multiple people by using the syntax ((nickname1,nickname2,nickname3))

/private/

• This will make the contents of the message private in Basecamp (only your company will see it).

You can combine the two commands.  If you wanted to send a message and make it private you could send a message with the subject “((jon)) /private/ Here’s that top secret info for you”. This would make the message private and would notify “jon” that the message has been posted.  You can’t do whacky things that Basecamp wouldn’t otherwise support like making a message private and notifying somebody outside of your company.

Definitions:

People: People are those in your basecamp account with whom you would like to interact using Mailmanagr.  Before you can assign anyone a task or send them a notification they need to be listed in Mailmanagr with a “nickname”. People records can be of type “Company” or “Person”.

Nickname: The name you will use to interact with people form basecamp.  Each person has to be setup under the “people” tab and given a nickname before you can interact with them using Mailmanagr

Company: A record used to interact with everyone in a company. This uses Basecamp’s notification system – so it will include everyone in a company in Basecamp, even if they haven’t been set up in Mailmanagr first.

Person: An individual inside a Company that you want to interact with.

Todos: Todo emails can either be a todo list, or an individual todo item.  If you do not check the “with comments” checkbox the todo email address works as a todo list.  This means the subject is the list title and each line of the message becomes a new item in that list.  If you do select to have comments on setup then you also choose a todo list you will be interacting with.  This means that each email to that email address is treated as an individual item.  The subject being the todo item and the message being a comment attached to that todo item.

Milestones: These addresses can be created to either take the date in the subject and the milestone in the message (default), or if you check the “with comments” checkbox on creation of the address you can use the date command and the milestone in the subject and then the message body will be used to create a comment on the milestone.  Milesontes can be assigned to a company or an individual but not to multiple individuals.

Messages: These addresses will allow you to post a new message to Basecamp in a selected category. You can select to automatically notify a particular person in your company when a message is posted using this method.

Wide Open: Wide open addresses are a paid feature only.  If using a wide-open address, anybody can send a message to that address without being added to your authorized senders list in Mailmanagr.

Use Plain Text: By default, Mailmanagr will try to post any formatting included in a message to Basecamp.  This can occasionally lead to unexpected results.  You can force any particular address in Mailmanagr to use plain text mode which will automatically strip out formatting from items posted to Basecamp.

File Attachments: File attachments are a paid feature only.  Files can be attached to email messages and sent through Mailmanagr.  These files will then get added to todo items, milestones or messages in Basecamp.

Authorized Senders: This is a list of email addresses you can maintain from within your Mailmanagr account of people who are “allowed” to send messages through Mailmanagr.  The authorized senders list is also how you post content as different people in Basecamp (different Basecamp identities can be tied to different email addresses).

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.