There are many browser based extensions for extending the features of Gmail. They are fairly simple but extremely powerful. Some examples are:
MailButler
https://www.mailbutler.io/
Cloud HQ
Gmelius
https://gmelius.com
MixMax
Boomerang
Vocus
And here’s a really great app that just does scheduling but would be awesome if we could make something like this:
Calendly
https://calendly.com/pages/pricing
The main features offered by services like this are:
- Email tracking to see if the person has opened your email yet
- Reminders for follow up, so if you don’t get a response from them in a specific time you set, it will pop back up into your inbox.
- Send later capabilities so you can write a response and have it send at a different time (And some even combine the reminders to follow up so you can write a note checking in, but if they reply to the email then it won’t send. )
- Email templates, allowing you to use variables etc to respond to frequent types of emails (I use this a lot with recruiters)
- Calendar scheduling integration, allowing you to send an interactive module or link in an email where they can see your available times and schedule themselves for an open slot.
- Kanban board integration, allowing you to share a kanban board with co-workers in a group where you can sort or assign different emails to different people to respond to.
A lot of these features are already kind of in NextCloud, and it seems to me that integrating it with the mail application would add HUGE HUGE value to NextCloud. All of these are paid services. Maybe some of these features (like email tracking) feel too invasive to the Open Source community, and I understand, but I can say that as a normal dev/designer who doesn’t track his emails, the ability to use templates, schedule calls, etc is a HUGE lifesaver. This brings a ton of value to NextCloud that isn’t currently being served by any other Open Source project, makes ample use of existing resources in NextCloud, and isn’t being offered by Google themselves, so this potentially gives NextCloud some clear advantages over Google Cloud and their G Suite integrations.
One of the reasons I started looking into starting my own personal cloud server was actually because I hoped to find an alternative to these projects. I don’t like that they require me to use Chrome, or that they only work with Gmail, and I don’t want to pay a subscription for software, I just want to have a limited number of functionalities to use to help automate my communication and email process.
I’d love to help build something like this. I am a designer learning to code so I can’t do this on my own, but I know some php, javascript, css, html, Angular 6, and React.js and I could contribute to this, if not directly to the code base, to at least the prototyping, wireframing, and design process.
In case anyone needs to see my previous work to know my skill level my website is https://jackalope.tech
PLEASE!!! This is super needed!
Also there is tons of demand for this. See the following links I found:
http://feedback.airmailapp.com/forums/260803-airmail-ios/suggestions/17770882-nextcloud-support