Matthew Lang

The perfect analogy of the relationship between Twitter and the user's of Twitter.

I don't think it's terrible or the end of the world. Life in a silo where you and I are the product. McDonald's doesn't ask the chickens whether they like the options for Chicken McNuggets. A similar thing. The main difference is the chicken probably couldn't say. Humans have opinions, feel disempowered, not heard, not loved, bored, and we like to be consulted. A good shitstorm provides temporary relief for all these ills. So for a while, venting, then life goes back to the normal humdrum.

— Twitter's new timeline? by Dave Winer

This week I had something of an issue involving my email and a feature in my CRM that I wanted to use. Here's the gist of the problem.

For each client email I receive I want to send a copy of it to my CRM so that it's easier to find in my CRM rather than filtering through my email for it.

Sounds easy right?

Prior to starting to use this feature I had started using Airmail for my email. It's a lovely app to use and has many great features. There was nothing there that I had to use, I just wanted to give it a try. No harm in that. When it came to forwarding my emails to my CRM I had two problems.

1. I couldn't find the ability in Airmail to automatically forward emails to my CRM. Not a big problem, but manually forwarding email takes time.
2. My CRM didn't recognise the emails that I was forwarding.

The first problem I could live with for a while, but the fact that my CRM didn't recognise my emails wasn't a problem with the CRM (although they are working on a fix to resolve it), it was a problem with the way Airmail formats an email when you forward it.

Now to resolve this I did contact the my CRM's support people and the knew of the problem right away and they offered a number of solutions if I wanted to keep on using Airmail. It involved a bit more cut and paste than I wanted to do though.

Just as an experiment though I forwarded the same email from Apple's own email client, Mail, and guess what? It worked. It just worked. No copy and pasting or changing preferences. It just worked.

Right so if that works what are the chances of being able to automatically forward an email from Mail to my CRM when it hits my inbox. Guess what? It does!

The thing to remember is that I've used Mail for the last three years. I only switched to Airmail out of curiosity. I've switched back to Mail and despite paying a small amount for Airmail, I might go back and use it again if it's updated so that I can use it to forward emails to my CRM. It's a nice email client, and others might have better success with it than me, but not that I see that Mail does everything I need I've switched back.

I only started writing about this little change in tools after reading Patrick Rhone's article on proven tools.

When it comes to the things I use, especially those I rely on every day, I want to use only things that have been prove as much as possible. Proven to work. Proven to last. Proven over time and use.

— Proven by Patrick Rhone

Go on read it, it's worth your time.

And the next time you decide to switch away from something that's been proven to work for you. Take a few minutes and think if it's worth the time doing.

Special thanks to the support staff of Highrise (the CRM in question), who answered my support query in the stupid hours of the morning in the US. Excellent service and excellent support. Thanks Highrise!

Love the colour!

via 8bar Bikes, original source

Feedbin just won the Internet. Email newsletters direct to your Feedbin.

What a great feature!