Developers depend on email services. If you are a developer, you probably spend a considerable amount of your day sending and receiving emails with team members, managers, clients, users, etc. A good email workflow can save time and headaches. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the latest advanced email services that can help you raise the bar of your developer email game.
The Importance of Email for Developers
Before discussing solutions, let’s consider why email is so integral for developers.
Collaboration & Communication
A huge part of a developer’s job revolves around collaboration and communication. You need to communicate requirements, designs, plans, deadlines, questions, status updates, and more across multiple teams like:
- Product managers
- Designers
- Other developers
- QA testers
- Dev ops
- Leadership
- Clients
- End users
Rather than playing an endless game of phone tag, email services for developers provide written documentation and a paper trail for all these interactions.
Central Source of Truth
Email is also the central source of truth and records for key decisions, plans and documentation. Since we are doing so much talking in Slack, Zoom, Jira, and other tools, it’s easy to organize information that is important for development in one place, via email.
Emails can be used to refer to key requirements, mockups, code snippets, links and other things. It’s a huge help to have things documented by email, especially when onboarding new team members or making a transition.
Tool Integrations
All of these developer tools, from GitHub to Jira to Asana to AWS and beyond, integrate directly with email. In other words, you can get notified, work with others, and take action from your inbox. By doing things directly via email, you stay focused and in flow instead of having to jump between many different apps.
Email is the mainstay of the developer workflow. However, despite its importance, many developers still use outmoded email tools and workflows that keep them from being productive. Next, let’s explore some solutions.
Upgrading from Outdated Email Services
For decades, most developers have been using legacy enterprise email services such as Microsoft Outlook. These are great for basic communication, but lack advanced features that are necessary to handle high email volumes across disparate teams and tools.
Email was invented in the early days of the Internet when email volumes and speed were low. Today, developers need solutions purpose-built for the demands of modern digital teamwork.
Let’s explore how upgrading to advanced email services can help address these limitations.
Introducing Advanced Email Services
The latest generation of email tools offers far more powerful productivity, organization, collaboration, and security capabilities compared to legacy services. They are built as cloud-based platforms designed specifically for today’s digital work.
Here are some of the popular advanced email services making waves in recent years:
- Superhuman
- UniOne
- Frontapp
- Spark
- Polymail
- Mailspring
These new email platforms cater directly to professionals like developers who live and die by their inboxes. They optimize every aspect of email with powerful organizational systems, deep third-party integrations, robust analytics, and more.
While the specific features vary across each service, let’s overview some of the core advanced capabilities:
1. Custom Organization
Advanced email apps allow you to create complete custom systems for organizing your inbox. This includes features like:
- Custom tags and categories
- Saved searches and filters
- Snooze emails to return later
- Send emails to custom folders/labels
- Personalized multiple inbox views
With so much project information flowing through email, developers need much more flexibility to organize all this data.
2. Email Automation
Automation rules do some of the organizational work for you by triggering actions based on sender, content, attachments, and more. For example, rules help:
- Move certain emails into specific folders
- Forward emails from VIP contacts directly to your phone
- Set reminders to follow up on critical unread emails
- Send automatic replies when certain events occur
Saving time on manual organization with automation gives developers more energy for deep creative work.
3. Team Email Delegation
Granting shared inbox access to assistants and teammates is perfect for developers in leadership roles. Delegation allows others to:
- Read, organize, label, and archive emails on your behalf
- Respond to low-priority messages so you focus only on critical emails
- Schedule meetings, requests, and reminders for you
The right person on the team should handle each type of email. Delegation ensures developers don’t get distracted by tasks others can manage.
4. Email Templates
Email templates eliminate the need to rewrite similar messages, such as meeting notes, project updates, requests for information, introductions, etc.
With templates, developers can create pre-built email formats with merge fields. They just fill in the specifics and send professional communication quickly. Templates are huge time savers and prevent copy-pasting between emails.
5. Email Tracking
Advanced tracking provides insights into how people engage with your emails, including:
- If/when an email is opened
- Links clicked
- Email forwards
- Replies
These metrics help developers measure the impact of their communication and see where follow-up may be needed.
6. Calendar Integration
The ability to schedule meetings and track RSVPs directly from email eliminates context switching out to external calendar apps. Developers can:
- Integrate calendar availability to find meeting times easily
- View calendar events right inside their inbox
- Sync email RSVPs to auto-populate the calendar
Staying focused inside your inbox keeps developers in a state of flow.
7. Email Newsletters
Specialized features allow developers to create beautifully designed email newsletters for sharing updates with subscribers. Graphics, content blocks, templates, and tracking make it easy to keep stakeholders engaged. Rather than relying on an on-premises infrastructure for delivering email newsletters in volume, email services for developers provide on-time delivery and versatile APIs to integrate with an existing solution.
8. Third-Party Integrations
As mentioned, advanced email apps integrate directly with the other tools developers use daily across code, project management, design, docs, communication, and more. This includes apps like:
- GitHub
- Jira
- Asana
- Figma
- Slack
- Zoom
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
Deep integrations mean developers can take actions right from the inbox rather than constantly switching apps.
9. Powerful Search
Smart search algorithms allow you to instantly find any email based on contacts, content, attachments, domain, dates, and more. Developers can even search inside the content of attached files.
With so much vital information stored across emails, search makes this data easily discoverable rather than lost in overflowing inboxes.
10. Email Analytics
Robust analytics provides macro and micro views of how developers interact with email. Metrics include:
Macro analytics:
- The volume of emails sent/received per timeframe
- Top contacts
- Peak hours for email activity
- Email response times
- Top days for sending email
Micro analytics:
- Time spent reading each email
- The time between receiving and responding per email
- Number of times an email is reopened
- Scroll depth – how far into an email you read
These insights help developers better understand their own email habits and make improvements. For example, batching email responses or setting tighter SLAs on replies.
The latest generation of email apps go far beyond basic communication. They give developers superpowers to handle extremely high email volumes across multiple roles while protecting their most precious resource – attention and focus.
Email Service Comparison
Now that we’ve seen the expanded capabilities of advanced email services, let’s compare some of the popular options:
| Superhuman | Frontapp | Spark | Polymail | Mailspring | |
| Core Focus | Speed | Collaboration | Teams | Privacy | Development |
| Platform | Mac, iOS, Web | Mac, iOS, Android, Web | Mac, iOS, Android, Web | Mac, iOS, Android, Web | Mac, Windows, Linux, Web |
| Pricing | $30/month | $12.50/user/month | $7.99/user/month | $9.99/user/month | Free & Paid Plans |
| Key Integrations | Gmail/GSuite, Office 365, Slack | Gmail/GSuite, Office 365, Slack, GitHub, Asana, Jira | Gmail/GSuite, Office 365, Slack, GitHub, Asana | Gmail/GSuite, Office 365, Slack, Zoom, Drive | Gmail/GSuite, Office 365 |
| Delegation | Shared team inboxes | Shared team inboxes with permissions | Shared team inboxes with permissions | No delegation | No delegation |
| Tracking | Read receipts, links, forwards | Read receipts, links, location opens | Read receipts | Read receipts, links | No tracking |
| Templates | Custom templates | Custom templates | Custom templates | Custom templates | Custom templates |
| Email Newsletters | No | Basic templates | Advanced templates | No | No |
The best email service comes down to your specific needs and budget. But in general – Superhuman, Frontapp, and Spark lead the market in terms of features and capabilities tailored for developers.
Key factors to consider are integrations with the other tools you use, depth of organization/automation power, delegated team access, analytics, and pricing.
Enhancing Workflows with Advanced Email
At this point, we’ve covered a lot of ground around why email is so critical for developers, where legacy tools fall short, introducing top advanced email services, and comparing popular options.
To wrap up, let’s discuss some specific ways upgrading from basic to advanced email can directly enhance developer productivity and workflows:
1. Faster Communication Cycles
With features like tracking, read statuses, reminders, and templates – advanced email allows developers to communicate faster internally and externally. Quicker email response cycles means projects can move faster.
2. Less Context Switching
Deep integrations, calendar syncing, delegation capabilities, and better organization lead to fewer context switches out of email. Developers can stay more focused on handling communication rather than constantly bouncing to other apps.
3. Increased Accountability
Email tracking, calendar syncing, and advanced analytics provide transparency between cross-functional teams. Developers can know exactly when emails were received/read, how quickly teammates respond, who is falling behind, and where communication bottlenecks exist.
4. Central Source of Truth
With rock-solid search and infinite organization flexibility, developers can always reference back for project requirements, mockups, snippets, links, docs etc. Email serves as the central source of truth as projects evolve.
5. Improved Leadership Scalability
For developers in leadership, managing lots of inbound communication, delegation, templates, and shared inboxes massively increases what they can handle. Removing low-value communication allows leaders to support engineering teams better.
6. Less Email Anxiety
Robust organization systems, powerful search, automation, and analytics give developers confidence they can manage email rather than feeling overwhelmed. This reduces overall email anxiety so developers can focus on higher-level work.
7. Enhanced Security & Compliance
Advanced security, data loss prevention, retention policies, legal holds, and auditing ensure developers don’t take on unnecessary risk as email volumes scale. Guardrails keep communication secure and compliant.
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Conclusion
Email remains the communication backbone for engineering teams. However, continuing to rely on basic legacy tools hugely hampers developer productivity. Modern solutions like Superhuman, Frontapp and Spark provide advanced capabilities tailored specifically for high-velocity makers like developers.
Upgrading email unlocks speed, organization, automation, integrations, analytics and security that allows developers to communicate quickly across teams while staying focused on flow. If you find yourself constantly distracted by email, an advanced solution can streamline your inbox. This lets you devote energy towards more meaningful coding and problem solving rather than just communication coordination.
The latest advanced platforms make email feel like a true productivity weapon rather than just a distraction. The right solution helps developers ship better products faster by removing friction from their most central communication channel – email.
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