Ok, we’re really close now. Here comes an especially useful Highrise feature: Email-in.

Highrise and email play well together
Highrise isn’t an email program. You don’t compose emails in Highrise. But Highrise likes getting emails. It likes helping you clear your inbox. It likes getting an email from you and doing something useful with it.

Your own dropbox
Every Highrise user get an email dropbox when they create their account. A dropbox takes this form: [email protected]. The “12345678” is a unique PIN. When you send, cc, bcc, or forward emails to that address, Highrise knows they are from you. Then Highrise goes to work.

Email to notes
Notes are an important part of Highrise. Notes from phone calls, meetings, conversations, prospects, etc. When something happens with a person that’s important to your business (or group or organization) you create a note in Highrise on that person’s page so you have a historical record of that conversation or interaction.

Lots of those interactions happen via email. A client sends you an important email or you get a new business lead via email. Maybe your attorney sends you something via email that you want to make sure you keep around.

When you get an important email from someone that you want to log in Highrise, just forward that email to your dropbox address and Highrise will attach it to the right person’s page in your Highrise account. And, if that person doesn’t already exist in your Highrise account Highrise will create that person on the fly for you. Sending email from new people to Highrise is one of the easiest ways to actually create people in Highrise.

Highrise email note

Email to tasks
Another crazy useful feature we built into Highrise is email-to-task functionality. This allows you to turn any email you receive into a Highrise task. You can also make tasks in Highrise by just sending Highrise an email. Often times you’ll get an email that’s asking you to do something. Just forward it to Highrise, Highrise will make it a task, and you can delete it from your inbox. Here’s how it works:

Highrise email task

You can append one of five different identifiers to your dropbox. +Today, +Tomorrow, +ThisWeek, +NextWeek, +Later and Highrise will turn that email (or just the subject of a blank email) into a task. You can read about Highrise Tasks in a previous post.

Highrise does send some emails
While Highrise is not a webmail or email application, it does send a few emails out. When you assign someone a task they get an email letting them know it was assigned. When a task assigned to you is due you’ll get an email (or an SMS to your mobile phone) letting you know it’s time to get that thing done. We have plans for daily (“What’s due today?”) and weekly (“What’s on your plate this week?”) email as well, but those will have to wait for a future version.

We hope you like it.

Sign up to have a chance at a Golden Ticket
We’ve begun issuing “golden tickets.” Golden ticket holders will have access to sign-up for Highrise prior to the public launch. To sign up for a chance at a golden ticket, be sure to sign up for the Highrise announcement list.