Re:Subj – An Easy Temporary Inbox for Group Discussions

Google Wave has been driving people nuts for invites. Did you get in yet?

I have and let me tell you it’s interesting, but very confusing. It definitely takes time to get used to and it has the potential to steal more of your valuable time and attention than any tool ever has. You can count on my word and people’s creativity.

What if you’re looking for an efficient and simple tool to communicate that will not clog up your inbox, steal your attention or be complicated to use. Is there any hope? Would I be writing this if there wasn’t?

Re:Subj is a group communication tool. It serves as a temporary inbox, allowing people to exchange information outside their ever crowded standard inbox. Before I expand all the advantages of Re:Subj, let me give you a quick run-through and explain how it works.

Setting up a temporary group inbox is easy as pie. Go to the website and fill in the blanks, i.e. a subject line, recipient eMail addresses, a first message, and your own eMail address. You can decide whether the inbox shall be public and whether you want threaded comments. If you’re unsure, don’t worry. Everything but the subject and your first message can be changed later on! Once you’re done hit the Create an Inbox button.

Re:Subj will instantly mail all recipients and yourself a link to the temporary inbox, as displayed in the screenshot below.

The cool thing is, you can choose whether you want to reply through your standard eMail and eventually check the entire list of replies and comments, or whether you prefer to read and reply through the website only. That way, everyone gets what they want.

Following the link in the eMail, you will enter the temporary inbox and see an overview of what everybody has had to say so far.

You can post a new reply or, in case threaded comments are enabled, reply to a previous comment. If you’ve had enough and no longer care about the discussion, you can use the respective link in the right-hand menu to leave this inbox.

The following screenshot shows what an temporary inbox will look like after a few replies and comments have been posted.

As the creator of a temporary inbox you will see a different menu to the right of an inbox than everybody else.

To add more participants, you can send invitations to their eMail address. You can also remove participants by clicking the red-Xed blue man next to their eMail address.

As promised earlier, you can change the inbox settings, i.e. enable or disable threaded comments or make your discussion public after all.

Finally, when the discussion has been completed, you can also delete the inbox.

There is a small menu in the top right corner of the website. It shows you with which eMail address you’re currently using Re:Subj and you can access your inboxes and your profile.

As you move into My Inboxes, you should notice that the top right menu link changes from My Inboxes to Create new inbox. The list of your inboxes shows when new comments or replies were added to one of them. You can also hide messages to shorten the entire list of inboxes.

The My Inboxes overview is especially handy if you decided to not receive eMail updates. This can be done in your profile. And in case you didn’t yet notice the green window asking you to associate a name with your eMail, don’t worry, that can also be edited in your Profile.

And basically, that’s it. You now know everything about Re:Subj. It’s that easy!

And the advantages should be quite obvious by now, but let me sum it up for you:

• no signup, an eMail address is sufficient
• receive eMail updates and reply through eMail
• disable eMail updates and read or reply whenever you want
• leave the “mailing list” anytime

So when everybody and their mothers has an idea or comment to a simple question, you won’t have to sit there helplessly as your inbox clogs up with silly replies. Re:Subj returns some control and you can focus on serious eMails.

What do you think? Does it sound useful to you?

Re:Subj

Image credits: spekulator