Here’s a mission team in a Muslim land with 6 local volunteers who are wanting to help answer 400 emails from seekers that are starting to rot in our inbox. After finding them, the team put together a pretty good plan for getting them access to computers/DSL/VPNs, etc. But now they need a secure way for these volunteers to access the emails, then respond to, and finally send them. To bypass the issue of whole disk encryption this all needs to happen online. If this system had some nifty capacity to manage/limit user account, route all incoming messages back into the central in-box, etc. that would be ideal. In some ways, this sounds, in part, like a Customer-relation management software package, but the team has no full-time I.T. guy, so the solution has to be easy to implement. Any easy solutions? If so, just click on “comment” below to leave your response. They’d be very grateful.
You might consider Highrise by 37Signals.
http://www.highrisehq.com/
Our team is using it to build a network of missions contact and it is working very well.
It doesn’t provide the email part of things but becomes a great database for tracking relationships. It should work fine with any secure email solution you could locate. You simply copy emails to a drop box and it places them in the profile automatically.
See what you think.
I have friends in the middle east that use http://slashmail.org…
My thought would be to give all six access to the same Gmail account. They could track responses to any individual message using the conversation threading feature on Gmail, and you can have multiple simultaneous logins to the same Gmail account, I think. Another possibility might be to experiment with the “Send as” feature of Gmail where you can have an account but send mail as a different account. Not sure if that would put the sent message in the sent box of the centralized Gmail account. If using that feature, you would need to set up Forwarding. Another possibility is something like Fogbugz.com with an email address tied to the account; people can send emails to the email account and it shows up as a “bug,” and when someone responds to it the email goes to the original sender but it maintains a threaded message around the original “bug.” Probably need some other kind of CRM as Fogbugz is very focused around bugs.
I agree with the gmail option with a few alterations.
You can use gmail’s “Get mail from other accounts” feature:
I would create one account for receiving email which is “known” by your contacts. Create 6 other gmail accounts for the 6 volunteers then use the “Get mail from other accounts” feature to collect mail from the “known” account into each of the 6 volunteer accounts. Use “Send as” when sending/replying to mail so that replies appear to come from the published account.
You may also send a bcc copy of every reply to the published address so that all email can be viewed in one location.
HushMail is great for end to end secure email. They have a free version and a paid version. With the free version, you have log in at least once every thirty days.
From the HushMail site:
All webmail users have access to:
* Spam filtering & virus scanning to keep your Inbox clean.
* File storage & sharing with other Hushmail users.
* Unlimited contacts.
* External POP3 access to other email accounts.
* Hushmail Express for easy encrypted communication with contacts at any email address.
* Hush Messenger for secure instant messaging.
* Email notification.
* Read receipts, auto-responders, drafts, and templates.
* Extensive help resources.
* Digital signatures for email and attachments.
* End-to-end encryption for email and files.
* 2048 bit encryption with full OpenPGP support.
* Hushtools, our encryption toolkit.
They also have paid services with more features, starting at 3.00 per month.
http://www.hushmail.com/
The goal is to allow them to securely view and edit a reply to an e-mail without caching this info on the local computer. This is very similar to a help desk system over a secure connection. If you set up a system like Mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org/), they would each log in to a unique user name over https, select an e-mail that had been entered into the system, enter their reply and then that system could generate the return e-mail. All content would remain on the host system. The quickest way to get such a system up and running is to install it on a LAMP stack such as Ubuntu Server, which has the Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language required to run the application. All of the software is free and open source and well documented. Additionally, it could be hosted anywhere that suitable IT admin could be found.