Contact Us - We Like to Talk!

Support Questions:

We spend most of our time at the Community Forum
(It is very open and your question may already be answered)
You can also reach the team at support@activeinboxhq.com

We are a small company with BIG service =)

What do you get when you have a small, down to earth team whose entire sense of pride & satisfaction comes from their customer's success? A direct line to the people making the product and the decisions!

We do service very publicly

We aim to do all our support in the open via the community forum, as it dramatically increases the number of people we can help with a small team, by cutting down on repetition (we heartily recommend it!). It also holds us to account as there is no hiding from people's problems - any dirty laundry is there for all to see!

Of course, we are also available by email, and we watch Twitter and the blog comments for feedback to catch the widest understanding of how people are using ActiveInbox.

And with humility

We believe in a transparent, honest, no bullshit approach to what we do and say. In our early days we certainly made mistakes with individual ActiveInbox releases, and we keenly felt the impact those mistakes made on your busy lives. Our pledge is that when something arises, we are committed to keeping you informed, getting it fixed, and tweaking our processes to stop it happening again.

For you

We are in this for the long haul. We have been going for nearly 5 years, we are profitable and the challenge for us in email is huge(ly enticing!). We do not have investors, we only serve you and will continue to grow and support you for as long as ActiveInbox fits into your life.

We believe in flow

Andy is an ardent fan of Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology, and especially its emphasis on flow.

The background notion is that modern psychology is focused on fixing people's problems, and there is very little dedicated to helping people be all they can be. Seligman and his associates at UPenn devised a framework for escaping 'learned helplessness' that breaks up our positive state of mind into 1) short term (and short lasting) fun - achievements, purchases, events with friends, etc.; 2) flow - being so good at what you choose to do that time is never felt; 3) higher meaning - something personal to you that dictates what you have flow for.

Flow is concentration, with clear goals, deep effortless involvement, where time stops and we have a great sense of control.

ActiveInbox's humble goal is to bring us just one step closer to achieving it; essentially making email - normally the great interupter and antithesis of flow - so well controlled and efficient that email blends into and amplifies our work.

ActiveInbox follows a fresh vision for email

At the heart of ActiveInbox is a new metaphor for email: emails are not a random exchange of letters, but a manageable flow of tasks.

We love the big ideas! As email is used by every knowledge worker on the planet, and there exists a little friction for every person an email passes through, if each person can grease their inbox to be a little more efficient then the flow of work between people, and therefore around the world, will be vastly more efficient.

We give Plus away (when we can!)

It's a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but if we can help charities even a little bit by smoothing out email control for individuals and teams, it would be an honour to do so.

And we also give Plus accounts to anyone who is happy to write a review, as we need both your help AND your honest feedback (there's no pressure for false praise either - you can be as kind or as mean as you wish, it all really helps!).

The only caveat is that we're a tiny team and we want to GROW so we can do ever more awesome and exciting things! And that means bringing money in. So please, only ask for a free version if you have a really true need (registered charities are very welcome!).

We make ActiveInbox for people fighting to make their way

ActiveInbox is designed for individuals who have the freedom to choose their own tools, and depend on email in their business and/or daily work.

  • Independants (Entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, investors and bloggers)

    Build excellent relationships and cut down the number of tools you use by managing as much as possible just in Gmail.
  • Customer teams (Sales agents and customer service teams)

    Easily share an email account to deliver brilliant customer service just using Gmail & ActiveInbox.
  • Business Managers & Teams

    Improve email to coordinate more smoothly in teams.

We have grown from humble origins ...

For three long and often lonely years, Andy slowly tended ActiveInbox while it found its place in the lives of a small group of fans.

GTDGmail v1, as it was known before several mad tussles with corporate lawyers, started in 2006 as a simple open source experiment to use GTD® to create a cheap customer support ticketing system in Gmail. Call Andy naive (he was!) but he slipped it into the public domain without thinking it would go anywhere... boy was he wrong! Within the first year it had appeared in tech magazines, received tremendously kind letters from early adopters and above all else, found a community who gave their thoughts, their requests and over $20,000 in donations to keep the lights on. Without them none of this would be here, so thank you one & all :)

Their influence led to us sensing that, beneath the dusty exterior of a donationware product, we'd struck productivity oil. So in 2009 we decided to polish up GTDInbox, transform it into ActiveInbox, and as a team go full time with the aim of taking the nucleus of the idea to a wider audience and increasing the value of the features.

... And we are all part of a bigger movement

ActiveInbox continually experiments, innovates and otherwise contributes to the global efforts to improve email (and more broadly, personal management). We work alongside GTD®, productivity blogs and the rash of innovative email plugins that have sprung up in the last few years.

We would love for you to get involved too, your ideas and feedback make all the difference to the product we produce. You are always welcome to come and share your thoughts in the Community Forum.

Press Resources

In a Nutshell

ActiveInbox is about excellent email task control, entirely within Gmail.

It helps you achieve flow in your email, to amplify your ability to get work done.

Turn Gmail into a lightweight task manager, make sense of the muddle with project folders, achieve inbox zero and get innovative features to do email faster and with greater focus.

The Brief Press Highlights of our History

Andy created GTDGmail in 2006 for cheap customer service in Gmail, it quietly took off (very quietly - Andy is a terrible marketer!) and yielded an astonishing $20,000 in donations from just 700 people between 2007 & 2009, ultimately causing Andy to quit everything else in late 2009 to focus on making ActiveInbox a brilliant work-email experience.

Today, we have 15,000 active users and nearly 1,500 paying customers - including entire companies (the biggest so far: 50 seats) - which represents a truly amazing conversion rate. Albeit still a lowly number of users, given how many people it could help and the growing number of businesses and 10m+ users using Gmail. Yes, we really do need marketing help!

Neither are we your typical tech startup! Something that has great benefits and considerable frustrations. We have chosen no investors, and we are a million miles from the traditional start up scene... well, perhaps 6000 would be accurate - in the enriching rural countryside of Yorkshire, England. A tiny team, who thrives on a very lean operation (Andy does all code, website copy, most customer support and acts as a general servant to our users; Pete does design and fights his corner for usability), with contributions of actual hardwork from wonderful users, and real revenues from the product. It's testimony to the times we live in that our existence is possible at all.

What People Say

  • "If @activeinbox and @nozbe could, in part, merge their functionality I might be able to bring peace to the middle east." @Roebot
  • "I have just achieved Inbox Zero status for the first time in months" @daveyank
  • "I'm addicted to #activeinbox. six weeks and going strong. I don't know how I ever worked without it" zumalifeguard
  • "I'm trying out #ActiveInbox for gmail and it's changing my life. Devs know my pain exactly. Super noninvasive. Highly recommend." mojavelinux
  • "The new @activeinbox is rockin'. I just flew through my inbox 3x faster than usual. Thanks, Andy & Team! You deserve a fabulous 2011!" @davidtalk
  • "Dear Lord... @ActiveInbox plus Boomerang and Priority Inbox has just changed my life in 5 minutes. @Gmail ftw." BradMcCarty
  • "Brilliant Convergence of Technology and Common Sense" Doug Cox

To counter this, in the name of fairness, we get our fair share of bile :) In an email with the subject "You suck!", Chris went on to say, "Your decitfull, liers... I want your inovation out of my sight off of my gmail.". Alas, I cannot track down my all time favourite from the self proclaimed "Jesus poet" but he was angry. Really angry. And was not afraid to rhyme about it.

Our Theory On Why People Like Us

It's because ActiveInbox works the way people already do.

It requires not an ounce more effort than is absolutely required.

In essence, ActiveInbox turns Gmail into a lightweight task manager and powerful knowledge base without requiring a new system, leaving your email to be just about making informed decisions, seizing opportunities and doing great work.

Why are emails just badly formatted tasks in the first place?

Because no matter whether you use a task manager or not, task managers cannot talk to everyone you work with; so your email inbox is the place where tasks and project discussions arrive because it's the one system everyone uses.

Most email tasks are just too small and fast flowing to duplicate into yet-another-task-system, it's smartest to just manage the emails themselves. To be clear, we think it a madness to 'duplicate' an email by turning it into a task, creating two things to manage.

Undoubtedly, email is dreadful for collaboration though. And so when a handful of emails really do need escalating to a better managed system - e.g. reference material for your wiki knowledge base, a collaborative task in Basecamp, contact info in Highrise, etc. - well, soon ActiveInbox can help with that too!

Where Does It Fit In The Grander Scheme?

As ReadWriteWeb says, email is a platform.

Our email client is the center - the nucleus around which everything else circles - of our daily workflow. ActiveInbox is striving to make that an amazing experience!

It's something EVERYONE uses, and most people grumble about, and is supposedly past its sell by date. We believe not so: email will be around for decades to come. We just need it to be less isolated, to integrate more neatly into our work.

Xobni, Rapportive, Wisestamp and many more are all working towards this with us.

The Event

The public beta launch of ActiveInbox V4. V4 is a near complete rewrite - brand new software, and most importantly, a brand new experience; based on everything we've learnt from our users in the last 5 years.

We will launch on Tuesday.

The Future Roadmap

We've got so much to do, as requested by our users, but the work falls into two big camps:

  1. Increasing human focus and efficiency to make gliding through email almost effortless
  2. Integrating with other systems - like Basecamp and Highrise - to properly connect email into your workflow.

Logo


Download

Screenshots

Please take whatever you need from the Tour page.

Video

The V3 Overview gives a great introduction to the concepts.

Use us - we are very happy to help

If you want any screenshots, background, icons, interviews or a light hearted chat, just say hi -> andym@activeinboxhq.com.

Do you also use ActiveInbox?

ActiveInbox should be particularly useful for journalists, who often have a high inflow of emails - many of which aren't immediately useful, but may become so in the future (e.g. as part of a story) - and a need to nurture their relationships with contacts. If ActiveInbox can help you better - let us know!

Tell us what you write!

If you feature us, let us know: andym@activeinboxhq.com, we'd love to share it here (and if it's particularly insightful, on the blog). See existing Buzz.

The Team

Andy Mitchell - maker of lovely products

Andy Mitchell - Managing Director

I take care of day to day improvements and talking to you all to understand what you need, and if things ever go wrong I'm the one you can shout at! I believe - and every single day we push ActiveInbox closer to this ideal - that the most beautiful software in the world is that which helps you achieve a true sense of flow in what you're doing.

Prior experience includes founding a couple of formative startups and a stint as a Nepalese rickshaw driver.

You can reach me any time at andym@activeinboxhq.com.

Pete Lambert - designer of lovely products

Pete Lambert - Lead Designer on ActiveInbox

Pete tries his best to make things look pretty, splitting his time between drawing pretty pictures and making them work on the internets.

Prior to working on ActiveInbox Pete slept most nights. He also designed and built websites and UIs for web apps.

Contributors

Stephen Augenstein

Stephen came along during the development of 2.1 and essentially - not to mention completely off his own back - gave us a far more robust and efficient framework for interacting with Gmail. Quite simply, without Stephen, ActiveInbox would not be on the confident path it enjoys today.

Rob Mientjes

Rob is our Dutch representative, and is the free-wheeling creative we call upon when we need some stellar graphic work. Amongst other distinctions, he created our logo.

Mike Crowe

Mike is an avid ActiveInbox user and wanted to help enhance ActiveInbox by integrating with Prism. In his spare time, he enjoys learning new languages, and installing software just for the fun of it. During the day, he's an architect, system admin, and programmer for a wireless mobile device company.

Peyton Stafford

Peyton is an another avid ActiveInbox user who used his clarity of thought on his personal workflow to give early feedback on the value of certain features, contributed his twenty years of sales & marketing experience to this website, and engaged the user community with the possibilities of what ActiveInbox could do.