Why MailDrop?
The MailDrop concept sounds obvious, but it isn’t out of the box functionality for Confluence, so why do you need it?
Share and Comment - eliminate email Forward / Reply hell
We’ve all seen it, someone forwards an email newsletter article to an email list internally, then someone replies with comments and highlights the bit they’re talking about. Then someone else replies and loops in the CEO… suddenly everyones inbox is full of copies of the article with one line comments and replies and endless footers and disclaimers.
A wiki is a much better place for this.
Wouldn’t it be better to create a blog post in confluence and drop that email onto the page, clean it up a bit and hit update. A notification of a new blog post is sent to people who want it. They can add a comment on the blog post and a healthy conversation can be had. What's more, it’s not lost in the email junkyard, it’s even searchable!
Make that email chain documentation
Someone asks for clarification on how to fix the photocopier by emailing all staff through frustration, and Jane down in the Mail room sends back a beautiful step by step description of the fix. No one has ever been able to do this before. Some other people chime in with some other really valuable tips and tricks.
Just before you call HR to give Jane a promotion you go to the Confluence Knowledge Base and drop the email onto the Photocopier page, removing some of the ruder comments about the photocopier in question. Documentation achieved, no one needs to suffer again.
Easily import documentation from external sources
You have external collaborators, researchers, engineers, contractors that don’t have access to your internal wiki. If they just email you documentation, e.g. send you a table of results with a full report PDF attached, just drop it onto a confluence page and the documentation is there and the PDF report is automatically attached to the page too!
Share that notification that has a worrying trend
You have automated systems, they have Dashboards and send out automatic notifications. Now, you notice there is a trend and want to discuss it. You have the email notifications over time but you don’t want to screen shot them and add them… screenshots aren’t searchable.
Just drop the email notifications onto the page and remove the bits you don’t need. Then add the explanation of the trend you see, and share it. Quick and searchable.
For example (yes we used MailDrop to add this):
Hey Team, I’ve been seeing a lot of these, and I think we need to make sure we have a robust DR in place:
[OPSGENIE-JIRA] Note added to alert: (P5) Global: Multiple products- some customers may experience slowness in Xxxx
Thu, 15 Aug 2024 06:08:39 +0000 (GMT)
From: Opsgenie <opsgenie@opsgenie.net>
To: xxxxxx@togetha.group
P5 Global: Multiple products- some customers may experience slowness in Xxxx
Created Aug 15, 2024 at 3:30:47 PM AEST
Status
OPEN
Note added
Statuspage incident status [MONITORING] has changed as [RESOLVED].Statuspage incident message [Our team has implemented a fix and we are currently monitoring the results.Status Last Reviewed: 5:54am UTC] has changed as [Our team has resolved the issue impacting customers trying to create organisations or change user roles. Some customers may have also been unable to access the Demo Company, or Xxxx Me. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. Our technical team identified this was caused by poor network connectivity and has restored service.].Statuspage incident component [Xxxx Me] status [major_outage] has changed as [operational].Statuspage incident component [Xxxx Platform and Settings] status [degraded_performance] has changed as [operational].