In May 2015 our team woke up to a tweet from Timm Stokke one morning. Timm has been working on GotDone, a web app to help teams and individuals keep track of what they’re working on by looking at activity across different apps like Basecamp, Github, Slack, and quite a few more. He mentioned on Twitter that he used Postmark to launch a new track through email feature using Postmark’s Inbound parsing.
Updates via email was really easy to build, thanks to @postmarkapp’s excellent inbound email parser. Highly recommended, /cc @wildbit
— GotDone (@gotdoneapp) May 18, 2015
I got in touch with Timm to learn a bit more about GotDone and see how Postmark helps his app handle email.
Q: How long have you been working on GotDone?
A: Mockups and wireframes date back almost three years, but most of the actual building has been done in the past 12 months. We’re currently importing your workday from 19 services, with more being added every week.
Q: How are you using Postmark’s inbound parsing?
A: GotDone aims to gather all the stuff you’ve worked on in one place, so you’ll never forget to log your billable hours again. In practice, that means you input directly, or connect services you already use to import events and activities (currently at 19 integrations and counting).
Shooting off an email to myself has been a solid way of remembering something I’ve used for decades, so it made perfect sense to implement a way to catch those emails in GotDone. I was already using Postmark to send emails, so it was a no-brainer to try the inbound parser.
Q: How long did it take to decide to integrate inbound emails with Postmark until you released the update?
A: The incoming parser functionality was decided upon, built, and launched in just under two hours.
Thinking about parsing inbound email on your own is a huge pain. Building a tool to process incoming email and turn into JSON is the first part of the job. Then you need the infrastructure to grow with your app, you’ve got to figure out what to do with spam, and spend time combing through your logs to find out what happened to a particular message.
Or you could get up and running with Postmark in a couple of hours in between other big tasks on your app or project. And save yourself the headache of troubleshooting your own email infrastructure.
