We make it easier to get things done

We are all about useability in problem areas that need a little love shining on them. With software, if it ain't useable, it just don't work... We love quality, ease-of-use, usefulness and, yes, even fun in the tools that bear our name :) (Oh, and be warned, we are not afraid to rip features out if we discover we can do it better!).

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 simultaneously cuts down our repetition and increases the number of people we can help. 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 long history we have certainly made mistakes with individual ActiveInbox releases, and despite understanding how those mistakes impact your busy lives we know that we may make them again. So 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 4 years, we are profitable and the challenge for us in email is huge(ly enticing!). We do not have investors, just you, and we will continue to grow and support you for as long as ActiveInbox fits into your life.

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.

• Entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, investors and bloggers.

  Your time is short and your money cannot be wasted... you have minimal interest in maintaining lots of systems; you just want to get things done. ActiveInbox helps you get as much done within your email client as possible, to be under control and at your most productive when working with others.

  ActiveInbox also supports your VIP relationships and helps you handle a high inflow of email.

• Sales agents and customer service teams

  Small companies (including new startups) all over the world do not need specialized CRM/ticketing-systems. Email (especially Google Apps) is more than enough to get started. Combined with ActiveInbox, you can share a sales/support account across a team and provide excellent service to your clients and prospects.

• Small teams in growing businesses

  With ActiveInbox, each individual is optimal at managing and processing their email (coordinating with co-workers, moving projects forward, etc.), which makes the team as a whole more efficient.

ActiveInbox uses a new metaphor 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. It is not just that the emails themselves are tasks, but they contain tasks, and as such, there is a very close relationship between the email client and the task manager. You can read more in the ActiveInbox Workflow, in the chapter Emails are just badly formatted tasks.

One of the biggest ideas that excites us is that because email is used by nearly every knowledge worker on the planet, if every individual were more efficient with their own email, the global flow of emails - and therefore global business as a whole - would be vastly more efficient.

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 clashes with corporate lawyers, started in 2006 as an open source experiment to mix GTD® with Gmail to create a cheap customer service solution. Call us naive (we were!) but we slipped it into the public domain without thinking it would go anywhere... boy were we wrong! Within the first year it had appeared in popular tech magazines, received tremendously kind letters from early adopters and above all else, found a community who gave their thoughts, their requests and very often their money 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 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

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Please take whatever you need from the Tour page.

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.

Can We Help?

Product Help/Support

We are talking, and have plenty of info, at the Community Forum, Support page and FAQ.

Press Info

We are more than happy lending expertise, or finding answers, to help with any articles you may be writing that relate to email and its future - just drop Andy an email at andym@activeinboxhq.com.