Question

I’ve been using various SaaS solutions for CRM together with my google apps mail. However, the workflow is just to slow, and I’m looking to switch to a solution where I can use more keyboard shortcuts and work faster. I need to lookup email conversations and update CRM records.

So I thought about switching to a terminal mail client with rich keyboard shortcuts, which I could also extend to talk to a mysql database.

What would be the best solution for this? I thought about emacs, but I’ve never used it. I use vim regularly, but I’m not sure if extending that to read email and access mysql DBs is pushing it.

I’m on mac osx.

Thanks
B

Answer 1

It depends on how much time you want to invest. Given enough time, desire, and willpower, you could do something like this:

1. Write a command-line (or maybe a private web API) to handle some of the CRM tasks, like adding a note to a contact, flagging them as something else, or whatever else you do. This would just handle doing something with an email address in your CRM, but it wouldn’t handle messages themselves. Probably a night/day’s worth of work for some basic functionality.

2. Once you determine which mail client you’re going to use, write some small bindings around the mail mode. I would personally choose Emacs because you could easily write a function to extract the email address from your message (or current buffer) and do some CRM command (via #1) with it. Emacs has some nice mail clients like mu4e and GNUS, so it’d integrate nicely. It’d also be simple in Vim too, but Emacs+evil-mode+(mu4e|GNUS) is a pretty good combination.

The advantage of this solution is you’re only investing a minimal amount of effort into #2 — these would be simple “get email address, call script” functions — so you could switch from Emacs to another client without too much pain. You could even switch between mail clients within Emacs!