PretzelBox 101 - Basics

Email is a bedrock tool of the internet. It is well understood by most and having an email address gives us the ability to sign up for all manner of services - from banking to Instagram

Most of us associate email with a handful of providers such as Gmail or Outlook. 

But, in reality, nothing stops anyone from setting up an email server and communicating with the rest of the world on their own terms.

This is the space where PretzelBox operates in.

At its core, PretzelBox is an email inbox but instead of being an inbox for an individual user, it is an inbox for your domain i.e., if you own a domain, PretzelBox gives you a single place where you can see all the emails sent to any email account on your domain.

Now that you understand which space PretzelBox operates in, let’s look at a few use cases where just having control over your own emails can give you wings.

Migrating from a my-business@gmail.com account to a branded, vanity email address like me@my-business.com is a rite of passage for many small businesses, startups, and solopreneurs.

...hand out as many email addresses they want without provisioning them upfront

It gives them instant credibility in the marketplace as serious players in their space and  establishes mindshare in the minds of users, vendors, and clients alike.

Money and Time Saver

For such a user community, having the ability to create an inbox for their entire domain, saves them money and time otherwise spent on setting up individual Office 365 or Google Workspace accounts.

With PretzelBox, they can hand out as many email addresses they want without provisioning them upfront at no extra charge to different audiences.

E.g., their affiliates can use affiliates@my-business.com while inbound sales enquiries can be handled by sales@my-business.com.

The best part is the all these emails received by these different email accounts are automatically forwarded to the email account used to sign up for PretzelBox so while vendors and customers alike think they are communicating with a company with a different departments to manage different facets of their business, behind the scenes there is a far smaller team managing the show.

Families are another great use case for PretzelBox. Broadly, its usefulness can be broken up into two categories.

Use a single email account like alice@my-family.com and use it to sign up for services and to interact with your child’s school.

Having a single email address which is visible to both parents gives them the ability to individually manage their child’s day to day activities.

E.g., now both parents can directly see emailed school reports, invitations to activities, and payment invoices for guitar lessons.

It used to be that managing their child’s day to day was one parent’s job. PretzelBox makes is easier for both parents to be involved. 

Use different email accounts like netflix@my-family.com to sign up for Netflix and amazon@my-family.com to sign up for Amazon.

Since all emails arrive in the same PretzelBox, you can see at one glance all your subscriptions.

The more enterprising amongst us will notice that since anyone with access to your Pretzelbox inbox can see all emails by a service provider, anyone can log on to a service by simply by using the Forgot Password option for that service.

No more need for tagging and categorising emails

One more benefit is that using different emails for different services frees you from the burden of categorising and tagging emails as they arrive. 

PretzelBox automatically places all emails sent to a particular email id into its own bucket

It saves you from having to update your email filter rules to include unique FROM addresses with which to auto-tag your emails.

E.g., Now your rule could simply say - emails sent to netflix@my-family.com with subject containing the word invoice need to be tagged in red.

Use Case 3: Teachers

Teachers are a special use case close to my heart because my wife is also an educator.

Teachers can ask their students to email their assignments to different email addresses. E.g., the first assignment goes to assignment1@sudha.the-school.com and the finals can go to finals@sudha.the-school.com.

PretzelBox automatically places all emails sent to a particular email id into its own bucket

This makes it very simple to manage grading and reviews from a single bucket.

Conclusion

I hope this overview of PretzelBox has given you a better understanding of where it can serve your needs. Of course, you might end up using PretzelBox in completely unique ways. If that is the case, we would love to hear from you via our Twitter.