Mail-in-Chat

Mail-in-Chat enable users, particularly the old age bracket and users from rural and agricultural areas, to easily create, send and receive emails, and for businesses to easily reach out to them.

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Update: Blog post here: https://ron.sh/i-made-a-chatbot-for-sending-and-receiving-emails/

Inspiration

1) I have several relatives and friends here in the Philippines who do not know what an "Email" is. This is because they grew up in the provinces (rural/agricultural areas) which until now have no internet cables or because some of them belong to the older age group. Email is an integral part of business communications and most of the time it is required or needed when transacting with banks, government offices, and a lot of businesses. Email is the traditional and proven way for businesses to reach out to customers.

Thanks to Facebook's initiative with mobile telcos giving these people access to "free internet" that most of them have Facebook and Messenger accounts registered thru their mobile numbers. With this, it is now easy to send and receive emails thru Messenger with Mail-in-Chat!

2) Not all businesses have the expertise or resources to build their own chatbot. As an alternative, some of these businesses create their own Facebook page and other social media accounts in order to cater to customer messages. With this, they will again encounter the same problem - resources. Not all businesses can reply to customer messages immediately. Some of these messages can also be overlooked or skipped because managing different accounts is a tedious task.

Businesses, however, has one single email account they can use for support. Managing a single email account is easier and more secure. Mail-in-Chat makes it easier for businesses to reply to customers because customers don't need to setup an email account and businesses don't need to setup a chatbot.

What it does

Mail-in-Chat is a chatbot that allow users to create, send and receive emails thru Facebook Messenger. It also integrates with the Messenger webview for users to easily navigate to the Mail-in-Chat webmail client. With Mail-in-Chat in Messenger, emailing is now easier.

Mail-in-Chat enable businesses to connect with Messenger users thru email:

  1. helping businesses to inform users of new products and offers;
  2. notify users of booking status (airline, hotels, etc.);
  3. help with customer support and issue tracking;
  4. a lot of small businesses are late or unable to enter the chatbot ecosystem because of lack of resources but they are still able to support users thru traditional email which Mail-in-Chat can help with to support these users

To summarize, Mail-in-Chat tries to solve 2 major problems:

  1. Old people and people in rural and agricultural areas do not have access to emails
  2. Small businesses have no resources to setup a chatbot support

How I built it

I used WildDuck to setup the email server on DigitalOcean and added webhook support to integrate with the Messenger Platform.

Challenges I ran into

Choosing the easiest way to setup an email server is not an easy task. I have tried several open source email server projects and failed due to some of these requiring larger resources or not allowing creation of multiple accounts easily.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Even though I knew how to write JavaScript from frontend development experience, NodeJS is very new to me. It is my first time to write a production server in NodeJS. I am also not familiar with MongoDB but having the foundation as a Senior Software Engineer helped me accomplished my goals in building this project.

What I learned

Having a solid foundation in software engineering and ability to look at a system from the bigger picture (architecting) is what an innovator needs and not the expertise with a specific language. To innovate, you must know first what you are trying to solve and you must know what is needed to be done.

What's next for Mail-in-Chat

  1. Making Mail-in-Chat secure is the top priority.
  2. Mail-in-Chat still uses the default WildDuck webmail. Although it has the complete features, the user experience with WildDuck webmail is not good on mobile or smaller screens. It is needed to redesign the webmail UI so that it will be easier for people to use it.
  3. Messenger Lite is not properly supported due to missing features/buttons. A large number of the target group (old folks and poor people from rural areas) are still using Lite. Lite support is needed.
  4. Mail-in-Chat is currently in English, making it work for other countries, particularly in the African regions and other agricultural countries which has the same target market as the Philippines, will be a great accomplishment.
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