Missive

Missive comes in handy if your team needs to collaborate on emails using their chat feature. Instead of taking email collaboration to something like Slack, you can simply tag team members to get their input right within Missive. This is an incredibly useful feature and can save dozens of hours per week, let alone keep internal communication much more organized.

If your email inbox is exploding and you want to delegate your inbox, Missive is one of the best email clients that can help take a huge weight off your shoulders.

Say you're a business owner and you get many emails that you wish your team could help respond to, but you don't want to give your team full access to your email inbox. Perhaps you're currently forwarding emails to different team members for them to answer, but it feels like a messy exercise and slightly impersonal as those folks who emailed you can see that you passed them on to someone else on your team 😬.

Well, with Missive you can assign specific emails from your inbox to your team members to answer. Or you can even take it one step further and use Missive rules to auto-assign certain types of emails to different team members (e.g. based on subject line or domain).

This allows others on your team to respond (as if from you) which will directly reduce your workload.

Quick Tip:

Something to note here is that while Missive will help you delegate your email inbox, we encourage you to think longer term about what may be happening to your inbox? Is it flooded with sales requests? Customer emails? Invoice requests? We generally recommend that a business set up separate emails for these types of business functions, like sales@yourcompany, or support@yourcompany, or invoices@yourcompany so that the emails can be handled through a shared inbox.

In this case, only important emails (that require your attention specifically) will land in your inbox, and there will likely be less of a need to delegate your inbox as the volume of emails coming into your inbox will be much lower.

If you don't want your team to respond on your behalf and you just want to be able to share email drafts with team members, and even comment underneath threads, then I would also consider Superhuman Mail (it's what we use).

I tried out Missive a several years back when I had clients writing me on WhatsApp, email, and SMS. I felt like I was going a bit nuts jumping from application to application to respond to messages.

While Missive was a good solution to simplifying this, I now actually recommend folks put up better boundaries in terms of where customers write in. For instance, having a support@yourcompany email address and letting customers know that is the only place they should reach out to you, is far better than letting them reach out through a variety of channels.

At Efficient App, when we did consulting, we created better systems. We didn't give customers our phone number and were super clear that our support email inbox was the fastest way they will get a response from us. Professional systems like this actually helped our clients trust us more as we were able to provide clear guidelines on how we do business.

But because we don't have multiple channels where our customers can reach us, we now prefer using Superhuman Mail for our work emails, and Help Scout for our customer support desk.

That said, if for whatever reason, our business required us to be reachable through email/text/social media and onwards, Missive is an ideal solution to have a unified inbox for all platform messages.

Every so often, we have teams reaching out to us sharing that they do most of their business through WhatsApp because that's where their customers prefer to communicate.

If this sounds like your business, highly recommend giving Missive a shot as it will allow you to collaborate as a team on WhatsApp messages. This means that messages sent to a business's WhatsApp number can be received and managed directly within Missive. You can delegate messages to different team members, assign tasks against WhatsApp messages (e.g. "Create Quote"), and pick-up conversations where they were last left off.

The Missive user experience is built around the team chat feature that allows for team collaboration. At the bottom of any email or message, simply scroll to the bottom and @mention a team member to get their input, or simply assign the entire email to them. Missive probably has one of the friendliest and easiest ways to collaborate as a team.

Missive also allows you to create rules that automatically assign emails based on subject line, sender, or domain.

For example, sales emails can go to one teammate, invoices to another. This creates lightweight automation without needing a full help desk setup.

If you don't care for team members answering emails on your behalf, but just want some basic email collaboration features, like being able to chat underneath a thread and share drafts, I'd also compare Missive vs Spark and Missive vs Superhuman Mail.

If you opt for Missive's "Productive" or "Business" tier plans, you'll also have access to Missive's API which lets you unlock their Agentic AI email assistant. ***But*** it's important to know that the AI usage isn't bundled into your Missive plan, it's a BYO situation. You'll have to connect your own ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini and connect it via the API. This means you'll have more control over the usage and pricing.

Once you've connected your AI provider, you'll get a chat pop-up on the side of Missive and be able to summarize messy customer threads, ask questions about past conversations, or even generate replies that actually reflect what your team has recently discussed. Your entire company will have better access to what they need when they need it.

For example:

• You use your AI email assistant to gather communications from internal chats you had with your customer, sales, and engineering teams, and it summarizes everything into a few ready-to-use talking points.
• Your sales team needs to find a potential lead that's buried in past conversations. They can ask the assistant to look for companies or contacts that might be good prospects based on prior threads. Then the AI searches conversations, pulls relevant names, and surfaces context.
• Your customer team has been getting complaints, so instead of a generic reply, the team uses the assistant to search past conversations with a specific customer, reference internal notes, and look up relevant knowledge base content. It can even identify previous customer orders, see prior issues, and generate a context-aware response.

Teams seems to be loving this feature and feel that having AI to help answer conversations/answer emails is a huge help, especially for client-facing roles.

A Missive con is that it has a few "extra" features that seem to be unnecessary, adding clutter to the app. For instance, we're not crazy about the calendar feature within Missive (feels unnecessary) or the ability to "Add Contacts". Your company contacts should be stored within a CRM, not siloed within Missive.

Also, while on the surface adding tasks in relation to emails seems handy, we're not sure how useful this is. For instance, assigning an email to a team member, should within itself say enough (aka answer this email). Further, if there are multiple tasks involved in answering a customer support ticket for example, we think it makes more sense to put it into a project management tool instead of trying to handle task management within Missive.

The Missive mobile app easily allows you to triage your inbox on the go. Simple actions like swiping right and left will allow you to either archive emails or snooze for later. You can also customize these actions based on the ones you use most (we'd recommend going into preferences and adding *Assign* if you're using Missive to delegate your inbox).

Missive has native integrations with commonly used tools. Here are some of the most useful integrations we found:

• Missive + Project Management Software. The integration with ClickUp, Asana, Todoist, Salesforce, and Trello will allow you to add a task in your project management tool straight from Missive — which we prefer/recommend compared to storing tasks within Missive.
• Missive + CRM. The integration with HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Close will allow you to add deals within your CRM straight from Missive.
• Missive has a Zapier + Make connector to help you build your own custom integrations.
• Missive's integration with OpenAI will help generate draft responses to your emails.