Crafting a better work experience

Missive was built with privacy in mind. It's a fundamental part of our business, as it should be for every company dealing with people's communications. Honesty and transparency are also at the core of our values.

The above sounds nice and all, but actions speak louder than words. That's why we have created this blog post to answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Missive's reliability, privacy and security practices.

To kick things off, a few key points:

• Missive does not sell any kind of data to any third parties.
• All data stored in our database and cloud storage is encrypted at rest.
• Missive is fully GDPR compliant.
• We've successfully passed security audits by security firm Bishop Fox, as required for apps handling Google user data.

You can consult our full privacy and security policies.

Good, now let's answer some questions!

Can you access my emails?

Technically speaking, it would be false to claim we cannot read your emails. Missive imports your emails via IMAP like any email app does, and stores them in a database. This includes text content and attachments.

Storing this data in our own database is the technical foundation of a collaborative product like Missive. Thus, we naturally have access to the database that contains your emails in order to manage and maintain it in good shape for Missive to operate properly.

This is the same situation as with your main email provider (Gmail, Office 365, etc).

That said, only a few of our engineers have access to the database in question. Even for these people, getting to your actual email content is not trivial. We built internal tools that allow our engineers to do their daily job (eg. see what is going on in the system, number of emails processed, etc.) but none of these tools display email contents.

Needless to say, we are not in the business of scanning, sharing, or selling any of our users’ data. We never access a user’s data unless this user has specifically granted us permission and asked us to investigate a bug with their account, for instance.

Can people know if I've opened their emails?

No. Missive automatically blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email. We currently block read trackers from these services.

Where are Missive's servers located?

Missive's servers are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). All our servers currently originate from the US East 1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS is used by companies and organizations such as Nasdaq, Netflix, the CDC, etc.

If you need a list of IP address ranges to whitelist on your server, you can use the following file provided by AWS:

https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

If I were to migrate Missive, I won't see you close shop in a year or two, right?

Definitely not. We are completely bootstrapped, meaning we don't depend on investors' whims or decisions. We control 100% of our company and we've been in the market for over 5 years. We've been cash positive and profitable for some years now. We enjoy a healthy and growing monthly revenue rate.

There are over 1000 organizations using Missive, including big names like Pipedrive and Buffer.

As a pioneer and key player in the collaborative email space, it's safe to say we're in for the long run.

Do you sell or share my data?

No. Never have, never will.

We don't even collect cookies or identifiable data points on our public website! Unlike most companies out there, who use this for website analytics and metrics. Not us.

Can I get a copy of my data?

Absolutely. As a GDPR-compliant company, you have the right to access, correct, export, and delete all personal data associated with your account.

To request any of the aforementioned actions, please contact us at privacy@missiveapp.com

How do I delete all data from Missive?

Please know this action cannot be undone.

1. Login to Missive
2. Go to your Organizations settings
3. Remove all members from your organization
4. Click the Billing tab, downgrade to the Free plan
5. Delete all your email accounts, if any
6. Delete all your integrations, if any
7. Delete your organization
8. Go to the Login & Security setting tab, enter the password if requested, scroll down, delete your Missive account

You will immediately be logged out of Missive with no means of logging back in.

Within 30 days, all traces of your Missive data and activity will be permanently deleted from our database, cloud storage, backups, and logs.

If you have any other questions regarding privacy, feel free to send us an email!

Sometimes you need to take particular actions for different groups of customers. Handling these exceptions can be difficult as your company grows. Without an automized system working on your behalf, it's easy to make mistakes.

With Missive, companies can create groups within their contact books. These are very useful tools for segmentation. But even more helpful is the ability to create workflows using these groups or individual contacts as conditions to trigger automatic actions.

It might sound a little cryptic. So let me break it down a little. Imagine you have a group of highly-select customers that require special attention and faster service. Instead of always having to be alert for when they contact you, with Missive, you can designate a group for them and then let it alert you when someone from this select cluster makes contact.

The previous is an example of our powerful contact-based rules. We're going to explore three scenarios (instructions included) on how you too can leverage this feature.

But first, let's learn how to create contact groups.

1. Click on your name
2. Go to Contacts

1. If you don't have one already, create a Contact Book.

1. Create a contact
2. Create and add a group

1. Repeat for other contacts

PROTIPYou can add contacts to a group directly from the email viewer. Click on the email address > Add to Contacts > Add Group

Scenario 1

Your top 20% of customers bring 80% of the revenue. You signed a strict Service Level Agreement and they expect the best treatment.

Group name: VIP customers

Actions: Notify Sales Team when they email + label as VIP + display 15 minute SLA post

Scenario 2

You're dipping your toes into the German market and you've hired Hans to help. He's bilingual, so he can answer emails in English and German. You need to have them translated automatically since you don't speak the language.

Group name: German customers

Actions: Assign messages to Hans + translate them to English using a webhook

Scenario 3

Your business (Company Inc) is consulting to the sales and legal teams at Acme Inc. Both teams email you to john@company.com. You need the lawyers' emails to be directed to your own legal team and forward a copy to another outsourced firm.

Group name: Acme Inc (Legal team) customers

Actions: Move messages to the Legal Team Inbox + forward them to the outsourced firm.

Bonus

Trash spam or undesired emails in the future by adding them to the contact groups Spammers.

Group name: Spammers

Actions: Trash emails

Batching emails is a concept that's been around for many years now. Everyone, from small bloggers to productivity gurus, has talked about the benefits of this practice. And there's a simple reason behind this. It just works. It does make you more productive.

How can I achieve this using Superhuman + Gmail:

I want to receive batches of email a few times a day vs email just flowing in constantly.

I just want new email 2-3 timed a day. Like an old school postman.

Any ideas?

— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) February 17, 2020

Let me ask you this: Do you turn on the washing machine for a pair of socks 🧦? I think you get my point. The same applies to emails; it's more efficient to write/reply to many of them in a single batch maybe 2 or 3 times a day, max.

One thing is sure, being notification free most of your day will help you focus on important stuff.

Here are 3 ways to receive emails in batches:

Set an alarm

This is the most straightforward way. There's no science or long explanation needed for this. Set two or three alarms at the times you wish to check your email.

A few of problems could arise from this no-frills solution.

• You might forget to close the app and continue to get distracted by incoming emails.
• You might not hear the alarm.
• You might miss important or urgent emails.
• It is not scalable.

Try Boomerang

Boomerang is an app that works on top of Gmail and Outlook. Among their features, they offer a way to receive emails in batches. It lets you receive emails at certain times, send autoresponders, and it can handle exceptions, so that you can still receive emails from particular senders, for example.

If you're happy with working and consuming your email from a web browser, and you don’t work with a team this might be a good option for you.

Get Missive

Missive is the team inbox and chat app that helps teams collaborate around many channels. It also offers a robust way to receive emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and other types of messages in batches.

It’s crazy that no one has mentioned @missiveapp but I do this every day with this email client. This feature and so much more has dramatically improved my productivity. No affiliation, just a happy paying customer.

— Zee (@Zee) February 17, 2020

With Missive, you can create rules to define which emails arrive in your inbox at precisely what times.

Let's start with a simple reception time rule.

When enabled, all emails arriving between 12 am, and 7:59 am won't show up in your inbox until 8 am.

The same rule can be created for other types of messages (WhatsApp, Messenger etc) and for different times of the day. You can also create one to stop all emails during weekends or holidays.

The above rule is rather general and not practical for everyone. It’s naive to think that all messages have the same level of priority. So let's add a couple more conditions to filter out all emails except the ones coming from your business partner and husband.

The setup is very similar, but we added an exception for all email coming from partner@company.com and john@mail.com.

We can add another condition to the rule, where it lets through any email that contains the word "urgent" in the subject.

Now all important emails will make their way to you instantly, and the rest will wait.

Missive rules offer endless combinations to make email batching work as efficiently as possible. You can filter incoming emails based on:

• Reception time
• To and From
• People in CC
• Subject
• Content
• Attachment name
• Email accounts
• Labels
• Conversation state (unassigned, assigned, closed)
• Unreplied and open for X time

As a collaborative tool, Missive even lets you snooze emails for coworkers.

Another way to stop checking emails all the time is to turn off all push notifications in the desktop and mobile apps. Missive lets you choose what types of messages should trigger notifications and which shouldn't. This works great if you are delegating email to an assistant, they can triage messages and @mention you only for the really important stuff.

If you ever want to check emails before the scheduled time, you can easily access them in the Snoozed unified mailbox.

Bonus

You might want to let people know about your new email policy. So we recommend you add a small text in your signature for a few weeks.

Or even better: add another action to the rule we previously configured to send an automated response when people contact you during the email-free periods. This way, they will gradually stop expecting speedy replies, and you won't feel guilty.

Here's how you can do that:

It's time we take back control of our time!

To learn more about the productivity benefits of this practice, you might want to read this article.

According to this piece from Wired, a modern smartphone user receives around 73 notifications per day. It also states that people receive more than double the amount of pings they think they are getting.

But as much as we all try (or not) to limit the number of notifications that come through our phones and computers, we just can’t shut them all off. It’s an intrinsic part of modern work life.

What we can do is manage them better.

In this straight-to-the-point blog post, I’ll share three ways to take control of your notifications with Missive.

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Snooze with rules: Restore work/life balance.

Rules in Missive can help you automate many things, including getting some downtime.

Turning off notifications is an excellent way to reduce stress, rest better and be more present when in the company of loved ones or friends.

It may soon be a matter of legality like in France where employees can’t be emailed outside of business hours.

With Missive, you can create rules to snooze incoming emails to work on them later. You can get very creative and finely tune the rules to only let extremely important or personal messages go through.

Here’s a sample setup for snoozing all incoming emails arriving before and after business hours + weekends.

Unwatch: Call me when you’re done.

This is probably one of my favorites, it lets you see the level of granularity that Missive offers you to focus on your work.

Let’s suppose you’re in customer support and there’s a new email about an urgent feature request from an important customer.

Without the ability to unwatch you would have endured a steady stream of notifications for something that is not within your scope of work. This allowed you to keep responding to other customers without any noise in the background.

Read more about this feature.

Team Inbox: A manager’s dream.

This new feature is great for businesses receiving a lot of emails that have dedicated teams (e.g. sales, support, finance) tackling them.

Previously in Missive, incoming messages could be handled in two different ways:

• Unassigned flow. New messages appear in the Unassigned mailbox of everyone receiving the messages.
• Inbox flow. Everyone has their own unread and archived state. New messages will be added to everyone’s inbox.

With this third new flow, new messages appear in the Team Inbox. The team inbox is shared among its team members, meaning that whenever a message is assigned / archived / closed, it will be removed from the Team Inbox for everyone in that team.

So how does this reduce the amount of notifications?

When creating a team, you can define two types of users:

• Active members. They receive notifications for all new messages.
• Observers. They do not receive notifications. This is perfect for managers who want to monitor the team inbox instead of actively engaging with messages.

The examples above are rather broad and may not apply to your current workflow. But Missive is very flexible and a wide array of setups can be achieved with a little tweaking.