Dispatch ❤️ Cloud Services

Published in

Clean Shaven Apps

3 min readApr 6, 2016

Some ideas of how Forward/Redirect Actions can help

It is now easier than ever to create todo items, notes, Slack messages, flight itineraries, and more — directly from your emails in Dispatch 3.3.

Many cloud-based services offer a way for you to create new items based on emails you've received.

For instance, you can save emails directly into Evernote by forwarding them to an unique email address, create a new item in OmniFocus, or have TripCase automatically import your flight details by forwarding your itinerary to an email address.

The benefits range from saving you time and hassle from having to manually import information like your flight details, to giving your todo items more context by linking them to relevant emails, to the ability to highlight and discuss certain emails with your teammates over in Slack.

Of course, you could have done the same by manually forwarding your emails, but we wanted to make triaging with cloud-based services a first-class citizen in Dispatch by rolling out Forward/Redirect Actions in 3.3.

Here are a list of cloud services that we know of that can take advantage of the new Forward/Redirect Actions in Dispatch 3.3 to get you started.

Also ❤️ Delegation

But integration with cloud services is not where it ends.

A customer sends you an email that your coworker is better suited to answer. And perhaps, there’s more than one such customer everyday. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could quickly delegate these emails to someone more appropriate?

Sure, you could forward that email to your coworker, but you become the sender of that email, and your coworker gets “Fwd:” prefixed to the subject, along with the original message quoted or prefixed with “>”. Besides the unsightly visual mess, your coworker cannot directly Reply to actual sender without manually copying and pasting his email address.

Here’s where Forward/Redirect Action comes in handy for delegation among teams.

I set up a Redirect Action to @honcheng, and when I get an email that I think he is better suited to answer, I redirect the entire email to him (intact), and he gets to correspond with the original sender of the email directly while I’m cut out of the loop completely. Neat.

You can find out more about the difference between Forwarding vs Redirecting:

Redirecting mail instead of forwarding it can save you and your colleague. When an email message is redirected, the only essential part of it that changes is the recipient.
The Subject stays the same (no “Fwd:”). The body stays the same (no “> “, no “FORWARDED MESSAGE”). The sender in the From: line stays the same, at least for the email client.
This means that the recipient of a redirected message can use her email client’s reply function to compose a message to the original sender directly, not the one who redirected the message.

We hope you‘ll enjoy the update. Update to Dispatch 3.3 today to enjoy Forward/Redirect Actions for free.

Cloud Services That We Know Of

Here are some cloud services that we know could make use of the Forward/Redirect Actions in Dispatch 3.3. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so feel free to chime in with any other services that would benefit from the Forward/Redirect Actions.