YesImOnline Introduction

YesImOnline is a minimal messaging / mail client designed to fill the sweet spot in between email and instant messaging, drawing on the strengths of each for improved and rapid communication between a small set of colleages that need to communicate frequently yet avoid the inefficiencies and breaks in workflow that either Instant Messaging or email would generally introduce.

In fact, YesImOnline started of life as a cross platform replacement to fill the inhouse messaging needs that had always been filled by the aging Windows only dBabble product.

This page describes some of the things you should know about the YesImOnline clients:

Windows / OSX : The core functionality in terms of quick and easy single message focussed mail processing between the Windows and Mac clients is much the same but the extended feature sets is currently still somewhat different between the Windows and Mac versions due to developers' own biases.
iOS : The iPhone / iPad client is a simpler client but based on the OSX client codebase, and is probably generally more useful as a fast mail processing client and includes push notification. Note the comment on security issues regarding push notification lower down this page.

We would be keen to hear what you find useful and what you find less useful when comparing and contrasting the clients.

Composing:


Windows	OSX	iPhone	iPad

Key user features

It lets you feel the presence of your colleages and accellerates important work by decreasing the round trip time communicating with those key people
Instant notification of important new messages, particularly useful if you use a web based email client like surgeweb as your primary mail client
Track activity as the recipient reads and actions the message you just sent them. This allows you to see that the recipient is responding to your message and informing you that can expect a reply shortly
Fast messsage reading and processing, single click message processing, without having to deal with a full mail client when processing a single message
Simplified message handling, you don't have to worry about specific address addition, or subject addition as you would in email. Single click or keystroke and you can type your message and be back to what you were doing before that.
Simple way to defer messages to later with automatic reminder, or schedule messages to be sent at a future date / time (client driven, so client must be running for this to get actioned)

Reading:


Windows	OSX	iPhone	iPad

How does it work / Security Issues?

All actual messages go through your normal imap / smtp email server. This means it can be used "at the same time as" any other email client of your choice. And if there is ever a problem with the online status server, message handlgin will gracefully degrade to plain old normal email.

In addition there is the NetWin Online Status server. This monitors the online status for all YesImOnline users and activity in terms of responding to messages. This gets linked to your account email account using a pairing token. This means that your email server login credentials are never sent to the online status server.

That is all there is for the Desktop clients, but for the iOS clients there is one more important piece of to the puzzle:

The NetWin PushImap server. This is solely used to generate the push notifications based on your favourites and other rules defined on the iPhone / iPad. This works by passing your imap credentials to the PushImap server which monitors your account for new messages and sends push notificatiosn via Apple to your phone when it needs to. If this is not acceptable for you for security reasons, then you should keep the push notification feature disabled.

Work in progress

YesImOnline does remain a "work in progress", with some additional features yet to be implemented or still in the planning stages.

Anyway, it must be about time for more serious feedback from the surgemail user community. Please let us know the things you do like, the things you don't like, and suggestions for how YesImOnlineS can be improved and of course any outright bugs you find.