Announcing Topicbox – our new product for teams

Email is important to everybody. Email is your electronic memory, your archive of immutable truth. It is built on open standards, and it’s the one truly global and interoperable written communication network. While instant messaging is great for immediacy, email is best for considered thought and permanence.

FastMail provides a great product for individuals and individual team members, and we’re justifiably proud of that. FastMail staff use our own email archives every day to check whether our memories are correct or to answer questions like "what were the specifications for those servers we discussed 3 months ago and what did the various suppliers quote for them".

That email history – the team memory – gets locked away in individual mailboxes. New team members start from scratch with no easy way to look back on past decisions or discussions. This became very clear to us as our own company grew, and we had to forward important emails to new hires to help them understand our history. Or not! Nobody has time to go back and curate their email to forward every possibly relevant message to the new hire. They either asked around, interrupting others, or did without information that could have helped with their jobs.

With our company values firmly in mind we set out to solve this problem (which is common to all teams with changing membership) and redefine what a mailing list can be.

Topicbox is our new group email product which makes team history discoverable, email archives searchable, and collaboration easier – we know because we used the product ourselves as we were building it!

Many websites and services are designed to keep your eyeballs on their properties for the longest possible time. We are not like that. Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life.

I’m not going to list all the features here – you can read all about them on the Topicbox site, or sign up for a free trial straight away if you prefer doing rather than reading.

We have deliberately designed Topicbox so you don’t need to be an existing FastMail customer – just start sending group emails to your team’s Topicbox address instead of CCing individuals. It is effortless to add Topicbox to your existing workflow, and you can start with a single team from your organisation.

Later when you add new members to a team, they come on board with access to all the best information in your archives from day one – as discoverable and searchable as the email in an individual’s account.

Try it out, we’d love to hear what you think.

Email us at [email protected] or tweet @Topicboxer.

Of course, all good launches come with cake, and we celebrated Topicbox at our last quarterly meeting, with colleagues from the USA and India.