I have some very big news.

We've decided to join forces with a startup called Emmerge, which is taking a different but very complementary approach to building better group communication with email. The new product is still in closed beta, but we're super excited about it. It incorporates many of Threadable's central insights, with a bunch of new ideas and a bigger team to make them happen. When it's ready to use, I'll definitely let you know!

I'm sure you're wondering how this affects you as a Threadable user. There are a few changes, but it's nothing too scary:

• Threadable Pro is now free for everyone. If you're on a monthly subscription plan, this will be your last paid month. If you're not on Pro, now you get all those cool features!
• The service is staying up and you can keep using it for the foreseeable future. Should that ever change, you'll get plenty of advance notice, and we'll make sure you can get an archive of your data. So, no need to worry.
• Support will be more limited, and we're unlikely to add many new features. We'll keep maintaining Threadable, but we're focusing our resources on the new product.
• New organizations can only be created by existing members. You can still add new members to your organizations, but new signups are no longer available to the general public (But, if you have a friend who wants to use it, email us and we'll make it happen).
• We're open-sourcing Threadable! We'll be making the repo public under the Apache 2.0 license as soon as we finish a quick audit of the code. Stay tuned!

Building Threadable has been an incredible experience, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat. Thank you so much for your support over the past two years. It's been wonderful to work with users like you, to support your efforts, and to hear your ideas and feedback. I'm amazed by the things Threadable users create together, and feel honored to have been even a small part of that.

I'd also like to express the gratitude I feel to my cofounders for their vision and their extremely hard work; to our investors for their advice, support, and encouragement; and to the partners at YCombinator for teaching us so much about what it means to make something people want.

If you have questions, I'm happy to chat. Just get in touch.

Thanks for using Threadable, and for believing in us.

Ian Baker

Threadable Co-founder & CEO

Our co-founder Ian just published a piece on the total size of the world's emails, over on Medium.com:

"And, so it is with email. 150 billion is an impossibly large number, and that’s each day. If you printed one day of the world’s emails out, the stack of paper would be 10,000 miles high. A month of them would reach to the moon."

Check it out: How Big is Email?

At the core of any successful team that does anything is communication. You might even say communication is what defines a team in the first place. Imagine a sports team with no communication: it's just a bunch of people standing around in a field (and, just between you and me, you all look a little silly wearing the same color shirt). Our goal is to get teammates everywhere talking to one another, and to filter the information they receive intelligently so that their communication serves them well.

We've studied how companies and grassroots efforts differ, and we believe we've created a set of features that will be super useful for business, but won't be missed by a professional society, giant art project, student group, or activist organization.

Today, I'm very excited to announce the release of Threadable Pro. It includes a bunch of cool new stuff, like:

• Private Groups: You can create a group that is only visible to its members. This is perfect for departments like HR or recruiting, or for a new initiative that you're not ready to show to the whole company yet. Organization owners can still see every group.

  

• Permissions: You can set whether your members are able to invite people to the organization, create groups, change group settings, or update subscription settings for their colleagues. We believe we've created a fairly complete set of permissions, but if there's something you need that you don't see, let us know!
• Custom Email Domain: Do you want your groups to be available someplace other than threadable.com? With Pro, you can use your own domain. Contact us and we'll help you sort out how best to configure your DNS to work with Threadable.
• Google Apps Integration: Threadable can play nice with Google Docs and Calendar, letting you share with a group instead of individuals. Very soon, your members list will even automatically stay in sync with your Google Apps domain.

For a complete feature comparison, check out our pricing page.

Threadable Pro costs $5/user/month. But, if you sign up while we're in beta, you can get it for $3/user/month forever! Just visit your organization settings in the Threadable web app.

On a free Threadable, everyone who's a member can read every message, create groups, join groups, and change some settings on behalf of their teammates. This grew from our experiences working with the Wikipedia community. There, we saw first-hand how, when you assume someone will do the right thing, they will generally live up to your expectations.

We realize that this isn't the best model for everyone, though. As a business grows, it's important to keep some secrets, even from your co-workers. Sometimes you're legally required to. Threadable Pro gives you that additional control.

I'm so happy we've reached this point, and we couldn't have done it without the amazing support and feedback we've received from our users. Thank you all so much.

If you have suggestions for things you'd like to see in Threadable Free or Threadable Pro, get in touch! We'll be adding lots more features to both products in the coming months.

Are you a nonprofit or community organization that could still really use Threadable Pro? Ask us about our special nonprofit discount. It's pretty sweet.

Until now, your Threadable organization has been invite-only. This is great for a small, close-knit team. But, efforts like big volunteer organizations, community initiatives, open-source projects, and political campaigns need to be able to leave the door unlocked.

You now have the option to enable a beautiful public signup page! Once you turn it on, anyone can add themselves to your organization. No more inviting new users. Just send them the link. Post it to your blog! Put it on the wiki! Post it by the coffee machine!

Here's what a public page looks like now:

We'll be giving you more options to customize it for your unique organization soon. And, like all of Threadable, the public signup page is responsive and works great on mobile.

To get your public signup page, have an organization's owner visit the Organization Settings pane in the Threadable web app.

People are constantly telling me that they get too much email. In fact, it's the #1 issue I hear about online communication.

This matters to us a lot at Threadable, and I'm really excited to tell you about some new features that give you an unprecedented level of control over what arrives in your inbox.

Now, you can follow conversations you weren't getting, too! Instead of joining a whole group, you can cherry pick just the things that are most important to you. Look for the "Follow" button in the Threadable web view. And, once you've followed a conversation, you can sync any messages you might have missed into your inbox!

Any time you reply to a conversation, you'll follow it automatically.

Threadable will send you a daily summary of all the conversations in a group. I use this feature to keep tabs on other teams. I can get a sense of what's happening, and participate where I'm needed without being overwhelmed.

Now, you can follow and sync a conversation directly from the summary! This means you can get one easy message a day, and pick the conversations that look most interesting to receive in real-time.

First message mode

"But Ian", you say, "sometimes a summary is too slow! I want to know what's happening right away, but I don't want to participate in every discussion." We heard you, and we added a third delivery mode just for you!

If you choose first-message mode for a group, you'll receive the very first message of any conversation. Then, you can follow it if it looks interesting. When you follow, we'll catch you up on the thread, so you don't have to worry about missing anything.

To turn on summaries or first-message mode, visit the group's members, find the member whose settings you want to change, and click their name. You'll get a dropdown that lets you change the the delivery method.

Back when I joined the Wikimedia Foundation, the IT staff helpfully created my email account a week before I started work. When I showed up, I had a week's worth of email sitting in my inbox. I could get caught up on everything right away. It meant I could hit the ground running, and saved me hours of searching for the info I needed to get up to speed. I was doing meaningful work on day one.

Now, you can have that same experience any time you join a new group. Threadable keeps track of which messages you've received, and you can tell us to send you what you missed! Just visit any conversation you're receiving in the Web View, and you'll have the option to sync the missing messages.

Use this feature when you've just joined a group, if you mute a conversation and then change your mind, or if you follow something new (see our next blog post for more on follow). Sync the last few days of conversations, and get started right away! Turn off your Threadable email while you're on vacation, then sync the important stuff when you get back!

We've never seen this feature in another product, so we're really curious how you'll make use of it. If you have feedback or suggestions, please get in touch at support@threadable.com.

Over the past months, we've spent a lot of time making it easy to get your communications into Threadable and into the hands of your teammates. Last week we spent a little time making it easy to remove things, too.

Trash!

Threadable's web view now has a trash can. To move a conversation to the trash, just click delete while viewing it on the web. You can't reply to it while it's there, but it's easy to un-delete it. To find it in the trash, check the bottom of the left hand menu.

If a conversation stays in the trash for 30 days, it's deleted from our servers forever. Be careful!

Removing a conversation from a group via email

You've always been able to add a conversation to a group by CC'ing your reply to the new group, but if you wanted to remove a conversation from a group, you had to visit the Threadable web view.

It worked this way because we didn't want the conversation's groups to be reverted if someone replied to an earlier message. It would be impossible to move a conversation that's been mis-addressed, or to create a new group to categorize existing conversations. So, add-only, no remove via email. This was confusing, though. If you write an email and don't address it to someone, it shouldn't go to them!

Last week, we added some clever new header parsing code. Now you can remove a conversation from a group by writing back to it and removing the group from the reply's To: header. Threadable will do what you expect, but if you move a conversation into a new group, it'll still stay moved!

This is possible because Threadable's email processing backend gives us a lot of information about your messages and the other messages that are related to it. So we can do the right thing, every time.

tl;dr: The format of Threadable email addresses has changed, and "Ungrouped" mail has been replaced with a group instead. This probably doesn't affect you, but it might mean your email filters need an update. It also enables us to do a bunch of cool new things.

Mailing lists have been with us since the earliest years of the Internet. Thanks to the universality of email, they remain one of the easiest and most inclusive methods to communicate with groups of people online. 

Over the weekend, Yahoo changed a setting that affects the deliverability of messages sent from yahoo.com addresses. Specifically, Yahoo published a DMARC record with a policy to reject all yahoo.com mail that fails DMARC. 

Since Yahoo mail provokes bounces from lots of other mail systems, innocent subscribers at Gmail, Hotmail, etc. not only won't get Yahoo subscribers' messages, but all those bounces are likely to bounce them off the lists.

1. Rewrite the From address to use the local domain: "Some Guy <someguy@example.com>" becomes "Some Guy via Threadable <placeholder@threadable.com>". I like this because it preserves the name part of the address, which is super useful when browsing my inbox.
2. Sign the new message with DKIM, and send using an SMTP envelope From at threadable.com. This gets the message delivered.
3. If Reply-to munging is enabled for the recipient (this is a user-level setting on Threadable, not a list-level setting as on most mailing lists):
1. Add the original From address to the CC, so that it's available to the recipient
2. Remember, Reply-to was already being set in this case, so there's no need to change it
4. If reply-to munging is disabled for the recipient
1. Set the reply-to address to the original From address

• Grab the name part if it's present, so "Some Guy <someguy@example.com>" becomes "Some Guy via Threadable <placeholder@threadable.com>"
• If there's no name part, grab only the local part of the email. So, "no-name@example.com" becomes "no-name via Threadable <placeholder@threadable.com>"
• Whatever you do, do not write an address that looks like "no-name@example.com via Threadable <placeholder@threadable.com>".

• Operate as a strict forwarder, so as to not break the original message's DKIM signature. This works as long as your list has no features. As soon as you add a link to a footer, change a header, or enable web-based posting, you'll need to generate your own DKIM signatures.
• Add the Original Authentication Results (aka XOAR) header. It's totally worthwhile to do this. However, it only makes a difference if the destination ESP has listed you as a trusted sender. If you have that luxury, awesome! Most mailing list operators don't.