Hacker News Reader

Comment by mroset | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use a tool like this for shared family email? As the kids are getting older and there's email communication from daycare and school and extracurriculars and everything else, the method of "all communication about X goes to one parent" is not really scaling. Just using one shared gmail could also work, but requires more communication around "are you handling that response or am I?".

It seems like fundamentally the same problem as this tool is solving, but when it's for family instead of business, even $30/month starts to feel pretty pricey.

View on HN

I use Fastmail for this. Here's what we do:

- My wife and I each have our own email addresses

- We have a third email address that we share with the school (etc.); this email address is not a real inbox but a forwarding address that sends mail to the first two

- When email is sent TO this address, the default is to reply FROM the address

- When email is sent FROM this address, an Auto BCC rule sends a copy to the other spouse

In this way we both get our own personal email addresses, but we have a shared address that goes to both of us, and we know if an email sent to that address has been replied to, what the reply was, etc.

Just wanted to give another shout to FastMail. I'm a super happy user. I originally switched over for business reasons as it had a lot of features I liked. The past year, I exported my gmail history to it and setup forwarding so now I'm 100% on it for personal and business. So much cleaner.

Paid service - but with all the features + privacy of not being on Google (Well, anything going to my gmail still goes through - but slowly moving away) + they have excellent and fast customer support - all makes it worth it.

We love Fastmail, and that's the service that hosted our email for a long time.

Hi,

I don’t really get where to configure the auto bcc rule when sending emails from third email address.

Thanks

In Fastmail: Settings, My email addresses, [address], Show advanced composing preferences, Auto BCC

Thanks again!

The easy option is to create a common email account and share that and create a rule to forward all emails to that common email to both your emails. This way any email is forwarded to both the parents.

Downside there is you can't tell what's been replied. In a shared mailbox you can move it out and disappears for everyone so you know it's done.

Unlike team members in a small company I actually talk to my SO every day and if it is important she will tell me or forward the mail. There is no problem like CustomerX wrote to Joe last week but he went on vacation and no one knows.

You mean you don’t ask your SO to just do it “async”

My family has addressed this (partially) by using an Auto BCC rule, so that mail sent from the shared address gets BCC'ed to the other partner.

But that… doesn’t behave the same…?

shared mailbox. Just putting a label/tag/category on a message to call dibs and a todo/completed status can go pretty far. I once worked at a callcenter that did that with hundreds of messages a day.

I tried sparkmail but it's a little much for non-business purposes to be honest.

Not exactly a tool like this, which I'll give a try to (but introducing new workflows in personal life is always challenging). We use https://emailshot.io to easily share and keep track of emails outside of GMail. This is very convenient in cases where you get the email and want to share it via WhatsApp, for example, or add them to a google sheet.

I have another variation on this problem: my wife and I get the same emails from school. We both have accounts within the school platform.

So, what usually happens: 1. Both of us get email

2. One of us sees email before other, may or may not do something about it

3. Possibly one of us fwds the email to the other, creating two copies in one inbox.

4. It's not always clear if (2) results in something happening. And by that I don't mean in (2) that one of us said we would do it. Instead, I'm thinking one step further: we needed to pick a Parent-Teacher conference. How do we know we did it?

5. At some point we might archive/delete emails

6. Many of these emails contain admin dates. Things like half-days, dismissal changes, etc. Usually with dates/times that then need to go into a calendar. So, we try to send each other calendar invites (from personal Gmails) to handle.

#6 is often the real problem. We're looking into the Skylight Calender. Some people swear by it. I hear people like Cozi but that app is a mess.

My wife and I have personal emails but also one that’s shared between us and set up on devices for both, so we can keep track of things that should be shared, like credit card statements, bills, and whatnot.

We use Migadu, which allows you to have as many mailboxes as you want with any plan, so it’s pretty cheap.

I use Cloudflare Email Workers to manage this kind of thing. It works well, especially for receiving mail, but when you need to respond it does break down a bit. Jelly seems like a better solution overall, but if you need something simple and totally free Cloudflare is pretty good.

I wrote about my setup here: https://www.commithash.com/posts/a-better-way-to-share-email...

Definitely been looking for the same. I thought I would have a little time before needing to worry about it. However, our newborn has additional medical needs, so my SO and I are needing more coordinated back and forth with medical teams. Also means that our newborn needs a mailbox of their own in order to register for medical secure portals, which we need to access on their behalf.

Please get in touch, we'd like to help.

Email sent!

Check your inbox <3

Mailing list with both parents as recipients? All my generic house stuff goes to a utilities@ alias that goes to my spouse and I. Works great.

Thinking of building this (and also for sms). Feel free to reach out if anyone is interested.

I think I can do something like $25 or $50 a year for an email address that's basically a distribution group w/ some smart routing for replies and something similar for sms.

Use cases as varied as shared accounts, everyone getting grocery delivery notifications, etc.

from my own experience. There are some amazingly interesting use cases for organising family life. We have shared drop offs/pick ups with another family which is a constant flow of WhatsApp messages.

I too have thought of a shared comms channel for all "incoming family business" SMS & Email would be a good start, but WhatsApp is a non-negligible channel as well.

And dont get any parent started on the 35 different School/Club apps etc

Easiest is to leave/mark message unread if you are not taking action. Not a 100% solution, but often good enough.

This is exactly what we were doing before we built Jelly. We decided it was not Good Enough™ :)

You can just leave a note to your spouse in a draft reply of your shared mailbox, like „going to take care of this, XO“ and avoid yet another tool in your setup, I think

Let's break out after family stand up.

Share Gmail credentials and assign labels for who’s handling the response.

i use racknerd and mailinabox. 3 years rock solid. no fuss.

i just have 1 mail@domain.ext email id that i use everywhere. everyone is logged in to that email

i use backblaze b2 for backups which are taken automatically. this costs me something stupid, like $15/year for vps and $12/year for domain if i remember correctly.

have to occasionally update the server by ssh which takes 5 minutes every 6-10 months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com