Our Users Are So Smart: Email links in BatchBook can now direct to GMail
- Posted April 1st, 2009
- Filed under: Our Users are So Smart
BatchBox email forwarding is one of my favorite feature of BatchBook. Every BatchBook user gets their own BatchBox address. You can use that address to forward (or BCC) email messages into BatchBook. We’ll handle the trouble of creating a communication, attaching it to the proper contacts, and retaining attachments.
On any contact page in BatchBook, email addresses (of course) are hyperlinked so that clicking on them opens a new message in your email application. Forum user Dean made the awesome suggestion that we automatically BCC those messages to the BatchBox address. He got an Our Users are So Smart post for that.
Some of our savvy forum users are Gmail users. So, they used a Firefox add-on to make all email links open in Gmail. Only problem is Gmail was dropping the “+” sign that’s in every BatchBox email address. That’s no fun. We were kind of stumped, though.
But forum user Marty wrote in with this suggestion:
… I know at least Firefox can be set-up to use gmail, and there are some scripts out there like Greasemonkey that allow me to make all my mailto links go through gmail, but I use several computers, sometimes a shared or public one or a friend’s which I could not do any of this to.
But I just found out that all these scripts do is re-write the ‘mailto’ link to something like this:
“https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto&to=PUT TO ADDRESS HERE&bcc=PUT BATCHBOOK BCC ADDRESS HERE”
It would be amazing if you could provide an option for each account to make all their links use gmail (or other webmail services). By selecting options, like ‘Use Your Desktop Email’, ‘Use Gmail’, ‘Use Webmail Service X’, etc. the mailto links would be re-written to cater to our email service. …
Dude!
So, Sean put the change in and it was live about a day later. If you’re a GMail user, just head over to your account settings. In the BatchBox section, there’s a checkbox to convert all emails to GMail friendly links. Then, every time you click on an email address within BatchBook, it will open a new Gmail window and automatically put your BatchBox address in the BCC.
Thanks so much Marty!
Yay Marty!
One small thing. I do have gmail open whenever I hit an mailto: in BB. However, it’s not a Firefox Add-in that enabled me to do this, it was installing the Google Notifier – http://tr.im/i87F
There is an option for mailto links. Works really well – there is also a version for the PC as well as the Mac
Glad I could help. I was so impressed that you were able to make the feature live by the next time I signed in. Thank you!
No, thank YOU!
Sean’s good like that.
And when a user takes the time to research the problem, figure out a solution, AND recommend it? Well, we’d be silly not to get it in there right away.
It’s folks like you that make this gig a treat!
Any chance you could make this work for those of us who use Google Apps?
It would be great if there would be an option to use my business gmail (my own domain, Google Apps) instead of the default one.
add me on googleapps also!
I also need an option to use Google Apps… thanks!
Thanks for the comments, everyone. We’re definitely looking into enabling this for Google Apps, too. We’ll definitely let you know when that’s available. Thanks!
Also need the google apps option. THe gmail one does me no good. You should give people the URL option to configure this. The URLs are close.