I'm really excited. I mean, I'm excited every time we launch a new Hiveminder feature, but this one has been the "Killer App" for me ever since I started playing with the first test versions a few months ago.
We've made it a priority to make Hiveminder easy to access, no matter where you are or what you're doing. That's why you can already get at Hiveminder from your web browser, mobile browser, iCal, Atom and plain text feeds, Google Calendar, iGoogle, AOL Instant Messenger, Jabber, unix command-line, Twitter, SMS (through Twitter), with.hm, published addresses, Quicksilver, or through our Web API (including just-released support for OAuth).
Today, we're releasing Hiveminder for your email client. (It's a Pro feature. If you read to the end of this blog post, you can save a few bucks when you sign up for Pro.)
First-class email client support
To use Hiveminder in your email client, it needs to support IMAP and SSL or TLS. Thankfully, that's just about every email client out there these days. Here at Best Practical, we've been using Mail.app on the mac and iPhone, Thunderbird and Evolution on Linux, Profimail on Series 60, Claws-Mail and Modest on the cute little Nokia internet tablets and even bit the bullet and tested things out with Outlook Express on Windows XP. Beta users have been using everything from Outlook to "OfflineIMAP", a unixy tool to sync your email to a bunch of text files on disk.
Once you set it up, all the tasks on your Todo list show up in a new Inbox in your email client. Hiveminder will create email folders for each of your groups and show your tasks broken down by who's responsible for them, too. It's that easy.
You get all the details
Every task shows up like a mail message. Inside, you'll find everything Hiveminder's tracking about the task. Due date, summary, tags, even the task's full history - it's all there!
Whenever you go online, Hiveminder will automatically update each and every task in your inbox.
Update tasks from your mail client
Hiveminder's IMAP interface is designed with "magic" folders to let you manage your tasks. Just drag a task from your Inbox to "Completed" and Hiveminder will take care of the update. Out of the box, there are also folders for common operations like "take this task" and "hide this task for...." Moving a message from your email Inbox to your Hiveminder Inbox will create a task for you. Dragging a task to a group does what you'd expect.
(Of course, you can still use your email client's "Reply function to add a comment to a task. Hiveminder sets every task's return address so replies get routed to the right place.)
Full offline access
The protocol we use to get Hiveminder into your email client (IMAP) is designed to make offline access "just work." Once you've set up your email client to work with Hiveminder, you can work offline, just like you do with email. Drag tasks to "Completed", hide tasks away for two weeks or even get to "Inbox Zero" nirvana by dragging tasks into your Hiveminder inbox. The next time you go online, your client will talk to Hiveminder and synchronize everything.
Free for Hiveminder Pro users
If you're already a Hiveminder Pro user, the new IMAP functionality is a free upgrade. If you're not Pro yet, today is your lucky day. Actually, any day before March 10th is your lucky day. Just use the coupon IWANTIMAP at https://hiveminder.com/account/upgrade. We'll knock the price down to $24 for your first year. That's just $2 per month for your first year.
To get started with a new Hiveminder account, visit https://hiveminder.com/splash/signup/.
When you're ready to set up Hiveminder for your email client, visit http://hiveminder.com/help/reference/IMAP/Login-options.html