Listbox was acquired by Fastmail in late 2015. Together with our Fastmail team, we've been busy working on Listbox's discussion service. Many Listbox discussion customers have already been invited to the soft launch of our brand new discussion service at its new home: Topicbox.com.
Topicbox: supercharge your team's email
Topicbox is based on the core Listbox discussion technology, redesigned to work better for teams. It uses a shared central archive to give your team a living knowledge base, and helps control of the flow of group email.
We chose the name Topicbox to reinforce one of the best reasons to use email discussions – how email helps keep your discussions “on topic”, when compared to chat or other short message services.
Moving to Topicbox began in April 2017. Want to join them? Let us know. Most Listbox customers should expect to move by August 1, 2017.
With Topicbox, organizations like yours will host groups at your own subdomain: yourdomain.topicbox.com (or one at your own domain.) You will be able to choose your own Topicbox subdomain.
Great new features
Topicbox has been developed from the ground up to improve on several key areas:
- Speed
- Better design – its all-new interface has been created with a focus on members who participate in multiple groups with your organization
- More reading options – users who prefer to read/search content on the web will find it much easier and more user friendly
- More useful for your heavy users – Reading and managing more than one group is a snap! We’re particularly pleased to add a page to see recent conversations across all your groups
- Reply from the web — Members can reply directly from the web!
For administrators, we've also made some big improvements with:
- A "For Review" dashboard to approve both members and messages, for every group you run!
- A consolidated member list for your organization
- Two new authentication options:
- an emailed code instead of a password for standard users
- two-step verification + a password for users with high security needs
Some Listbox features are not yet available:
- schedule a message for later (not planned)
- a self-hosted subscription form (coming soon)
- open rate statistics (coming soon)
- custom member fields (coming later)
We also know that every organization has their own workflows, and that Listbox features are still being migrated to Topicbox. If you believe something you or your users use regularly is not present or possible with Topicbox, please email us!
What changes will users see?
From a user perspective, groups should work almost exactly the same. Email users should require no changes.
Mail sent to the @listbox.com address will still work, but groups will refer to themselves at the new address at the Topicbox subdomain you chose.
If you have web archives, your old links will continue to work, but they will redirect to the new pages at topicbox.com. Both the member settings page and the message archives will look different, but we hope these changes are all for the better!
We're keeping the things you love
The excellent telephone and chat support we know you love about Listbox won’t be changing — your favorite support staff will be supporting Topicbox as well.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at support@topicbox.com