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Trapped beneath the rubble of the Grumley center, Chad, Jason, Paul & Amelia bumble through AutomationTown’s abandoned subway tunnels in search of answers.
This week’s all about email, and how to automate it. Aliases, inbox rules, help desk tools, where do apps like Zapier come into play. Let’s take the pain out of the very worst part of work.
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Welcome to AutomationTown! A podcast about regular people, building automations for the problems we all share.
First time here? Start with S02E01 "For When You Need A Chatbot"
What are the things you do each day that you'd rather forget?
Chad & Jason explore common pain points for knowledge workers, and track down the people & tools necessary to automate trivial to-do's.
Previously on Automation Town, open the window
for a few moments Today, we were robbed of the security and comfort of our lives here in Automation town. The safety of belonging in a community of like-minded and forward thinking citizens, a generation of people growing up without knowing how to put in a hard day's. I knew I recognized that voice. You knew who that was?
It was the Mayor of Manuel. The mayor of Manuel. That was him. Jacob Mccr Barry. The area we are going to is off limits to all, but those with Epsilon five clearance need. I remind you, you agreed that what you saw that day would never be spoken of again. What happened happened. It's in the past now. October 9th, 1982, subway collapse leaves dozens.
End. I'd like to introduce you to your new sound engineer. Meet Amelia. Hi guys. So excited to work with you. Taking over. I. Okay. What will I do? Amelia will bring this show, the professionalism. It's been lacking the subway. My grandfather now buzz. Subway, my grandfather, and Buzz. As we enter a new chapter, I want to be very clear about your role and what is about to happen.
Paul, your friends' fates were sealed. The moment they saw things they should never have seen.
Oh my God. Oh. Weak dork. You're going to use. We need to go now. Pow. We need to keep moving. I don't know. You think they'll find us in here? We don't wanna hang around here.
Oh my gosh.
What just happened Was that just the grumbling center?
And Treasure Golden Grand piano.
Hello?
Excuse me. Oh, hi. Hold on.
Hello. Uh, how can I help you? I'm looking for this type of battery. Sure. This looks like a CR 2032, uh, lithium coil type cell. Three volts, two 40000000th hours, often mistaken for the CR 2025 due to their similar size. But the CR 2032 is a superior battery. So do you have, do you really use these any weapon siding systems?
I just need a couple four kits Toy. Yeah, they're right over here. Immediately thereafter, the building itself collapsed. Another day, another disaster and automation downing. At the time of the incident, what happened? The Grummy Center, it just audio engineer fell over. Currently missing. They recording Studio Mayor Goodway and owner of the radio station, buzz Mc Tompkins, at a press conference just minutes ago.
I just, I fear the worst for the automation show. We're gonna get to the bottom of it. Truly a sad day for the residents of automation town. That building was hardly six months old. Unknown conspiracy theorist, but what's a six month old building doing? Falling over? But that's where, where it is, it fell over.
Right on top of the automation town team. Shame. I like them. Oh, well. So these batteries should work those. Those are my friends. Well, isn't that ominous this week? What just happened to the Grimley Center? Did our friends make it out? Who's behind the. And we talk about the very worst part of work email.
Ugh, nobody likes it. So can we automate it? I'll add more on this week's automation town.
So let me get this. You saw some spooky police beneath the Capitol building. Yep. And those same spooky police chased you into the Grimley Center? Yep. Yep. We escaped through a secret tunnel under the Building Unabandoned subway project. Then they blew up the building because why? Again? The Mayor of Berg, Jake MCC Kringle, Barry Jake, mic Kringle Barry, Jake Mccr, galberry.
He's been kind of making some threats. We have. Ideological differences. We think automation is the future. He thinks the old ways are the best. It's all very noble. And that would make someone bring a building down on top of you. That sums it up. The real question is, what's next? You mean how do we get out of these tunnels?
I mean, what happens when somebody tries to uh, well, like, bury you? Bury you, but you come out the other side. Oh man. Does this mean the end of automation show? Yeah. Mm-hmm. , I think that's what that, that's probably, that's what that means. Duh. Paul Uhhuh step. Paul, where would we even record it? Can I draw everyone's attention back to the fact that we've been buried alive in this tunnel and need to find a way out?
That is a problem, isn't it? Well, if this was a subway tunnel, it has to have several entry points, right? If they actually finished it.
Here we go. Is that a convenient hallway with a single metal door at the end of it? Yes it is. I'm afraid. Okay. Who's gonna try the door? Not it. What? I will try the door.
It's locked. Hang on. Maybe I can, oh yeah, that's not happen. Well, where do we go from here?
Doors open. That was awesome. Uh, well, Jason, you want to do the otters? Okay. Uh, thank goodness for phone flash. Oh, here we go.
Well, that's better. Why is there power all the way down here for lights? This looks like, um, what is this? Some sort of control room. Something to do with the subway system. Check out these pipes. Wow. Some kind of utility water. Maybe check this out. Is that a backpack? Is that backpack plugged into the wall?
This is a cell phone signal booster. Basically a portable cell tower. Well look at that. I've got cell signal now. Whoa. 3g. 3g. Higher frequency protocols like 4G and 5G don't penetrate structures or earth as well as something like 3g. So if you need a signal underground, 3G is the way to go. I guess the question.
What do we need cell service down here for? You'd need it for something like, Yeah, look at this. Uh, plugs in the usb. Looks like it has a remote. Uh, the cable goes from over here. There's an input, uh, xlr, um, uh, Jepsen 1 0 5. It's a KVM over IP switch used to remotely control computer. Yeah. KVM over IP right now.
I guess you wouldn't want to have to come down here anytime you needed to do, I guess whatever it is you do down here, guys. Uh, gang. Remember the other night when there was that rumbling during the show rumbling? We were in the middle of a show and the ground started shaking like an earthquake. Like an earthquake, but there wasn't an earthquake.
You think all this could have caused that or could have been related to the break-in at the Grum? They did go through the spooky door. Well, as interesting as that all sounds, what I don't see is a way out. You're right about that. Sorry, it's my email. I guess I just connected to the 3G . What? That was a lot of emails.
And you have notifications turned on for, uh, emails. Ugh. Yes. I get a lot of work. Emails. They aren't as cool. Oh, I've got emails too. Well, when you two are done catching up on email, maybe we could make a plan to maybe get outta. I say we keep walking, keep walking. We've got internet.
Let's call for help and tell them. Hi, it's Jason. I am, uh, underground. You're gonna wanna dig through the grumbling, rubble, take a right walk about a quarter mile and we'll be the first door on your left. Okay. Maybe that doesn't help. All right, let's move up. You still have 3g? I don't, but I can still send emails and offline mode.
So you're gonna use this time to catch up on email. You got a better idea of how to pass the time. . So what are you using for email? On mobile, I'm using superhuman. So there's a difference between what you use on mobile and what you use on your computer. I don't know why I said on mobile, I use it both on mobile and on desktop.
But what I do love about Superhuman Mobile is it downloads all your messages so that if you do go offline or in airplane mode, you can still read them and then you can like schedule them to send so that when you get an internet connection, it'll send it out and it's actually even smart enough to where if you got another message from that person before it goes.
It holds it back, which is always my fear with like pre-scheduling messages, right? I'm gonna send this thing to a person on Monday, but what if on Sunday they tell me that their cat dies or something like that? . Okay. I'm not a superhuman user. Kind of like watching it from the sidelines. Tell me what superhuman is.
So I think the, no, it's a few years old now. I think the novelty of it originally was, you know, they always said it's the fastest email experience on the web because, You kind of reinvented keyboard shortcuts for web apps. I think you can basically navigate the whole thing with your keyboard. It's super snappy and it's just like kind of minimalist and not anything more than it needs to be and very fast, I guess.
Why would someone use it? Just because they want to use shortcuts. Uh, there's definitely like a club kind of vibe was superhuman. Like I associate it with like the tech bros who were using it in the very beginning. For me, like I get such a huge volume of email that anything that can make my email processing even the slightest bit faster, like, oh Mama, I will happily pay for, and that's the thing with Superhuman is it's a paid email client, which.
There's a lot of like pearl clutching. As soon as you say that, I think, cuz people are like, what do you mean you have to actually pay for something email related . But because I just have such a wild volume of it, it does make my life faster. I do love the super like keyboard shortcut enabled like version of email.
I was late to the party. Honestly, I've made fun of it for years, but I love it now. , you got me stuck on. I feel really left out right now. I guess the one sentence sales pitch to convince anyone to try out superhuman, what could they expect if they just tried it out for the first couple weeks? So every day you get an email from Superhuman that's like, here's kind of a way to build on what you know so far.
And so they kind of like phase in those lessons on that muscle memory a day at a time. Oh, okay. Like for me, I, for small volume email users totally doesn't make sense if you use a ton of email. I think it makes great sense. Like it's, it's the most focused email client I've ever used. I've turned a lot of people onto it.
I think most of them stuck with it. So if that's you, uh, it could be something that you're into. Gotcha. So if we're down in the middle of a basement underneath the ground, You can work offline and there's no issues you can, right? Like I assume nobody else's emails are synced to their phones right now.
What do you use, Paul? Long Live Hotmail. You're using Hotmail, Paul? Uh, yeah. Paul, what about yourself, Chad? I'm. Gmail, Google apps using vanilla Gmail, vanilla. Oh, for work. We've got it hooked up into some project management stuff, but the majority of stuff goes through Gmail, and that's the app I have on my phone.
That's where I've got all my filters. That's where I've got all my forwards and all my organization, and that's where I'm, that's where I'm, that's where I'm living. That's where you feel comfy. There's no shame in that. What's an inbox rule? What's an what? What's an inbox? Are you kidding me? Okay, so maybe I have a few things to learn about tech, but I'd also like to see tech kick down that metal door.
So an inbox rule for me and Gmail right now is, It's essentially called a filter. If you want something to happen to an email when it comes in, you can apply a filter. It's been around for a long time, but you can essentially say if something has a certain amount of text in it, or it's from a certain person, you can set up a rule, send it somewhere else, or it could be marked as read or archived.
Do a whole bunch of stuff with it automatically without having to lift your finger yourself. When you say lift a finger, is that because it. Keyboard shortcut enabled . It was. It was a dig at you. Yeah, you cut. You caught that one. , I will say for all of like the sexy automation that's out there. Email automation is probably like the automation we all need more of because it's what we spend so much time on.
And then you have like this one task that you do twice a month that takes 20 minutes and you're like, I'm pretty sure I could automate this. And then you spend like six hours a day on email and never think about email automation. But inbox rules were like, A pretty og awesome automation, right? Mm-hmm.
move it to a folder, then you would never go to the folder. Yeah. . That was pretty awesome. Yeah. Um, , there was also, um, I guess another type of automation we use is, uh, email aliases. So easy to do in Gmail. Yeah. Okay. I'll bite. What's an email alias? Oh, something comes in from your, you know, uh, name plus newsletter@gmail.com.
You know, you can do exactly what you want to do with that through your, through your filters. Yeah. So the office environment version of that, you can set up something like 30 aliases per mailbox, I think is what they call it. But the beauty of Google stuff is, it's literally like, if you're, like, if my email is jason gmail dot.
I can literally just put a plus after Jason and then whatever I want. And it's like a on the fly alias. Uh, so like jason plus newsletters gmail.com. In fact, I wrote a newsletter at one point and one of my subscribers was, you know, Chad or whatever. Plus. Low priority newsletters, gmail.com, like easy guy.
But like I totally had that, I totally forgot about that. Like there's so many useful applications for those aliases. Oh, I think I used in it for the gift cards once when signing up for something. You can also put periods, oh, with Gmail too. So if you have, you know, Jason, you can put j o. And then it'll still come through, and then you can run your automations based off of that j o n, which is kinda nice.
Yeah, I think anytime you're managing an inbox for. You know, a bunch of organizations or a situation where there's a lot of context that would be helpful. I think aliases can be leveraged in really powerful ways. At one point I was working with a group of dental clinics and they had, you know, 20 plus locations and it was all managed from kind of like a central admin hub and all those bills had to go somewhere and all the receipts had to go somewhere in payroll hours and all that stuff.
Mm-hmm. . And what we actually did was we used these alias. And so every clinic location had a three letter abbreviation and every document class had another three letter abbreviation. So Bill was b i l, C was r e c. And after the plus you would put the three letter code for the location dot three letter code for the document type.
And then I think inside of Make, we would parse out those two codes. And if it was, you know, location x and a, It would go to the bill.com account for that company, or if it was a receipt, it would go to the Dropbox folder for that location, and because we had those aliases set up and enabled all those things to be processed automatically.
So you are super woke on your automations now. You just have to convince a whole bunch of people to follow your rules. Well, the best part is when you set that up with the vendor, so like the notifications, like go to that place correctly because that's what you don't want is human beings then forwarding it.
Right? Right. But yeah, in a perfect world you set it up that way with the vendor Uhhuh . So what are we gonna do when we get outta here? What do. They tried to bury us if we just waltz out here unscathed that, yeah. I guess with that ominous Jake note, I don't get the impression that they want us telling our story.
You think they're looking for us? They aren't gonna want us to talk. Who is they again? The bad guys. Jake, the mayor. Buzz Buzz. Yeah. We aren't really sure who's behind all. I mean, Jake left me the note. We know that much. I can assure you Uncle Buzz would have nothing to do with something Jake is involved in.
What do you mean Buzz can't stand? Jake? There's some long running beef between the two of them. I mean, Jake did take over the radio show. So do you think they're like waiting for us, like camped it at our house? It does seem like that's where they would go looking for us, doesn't it? Well, I've got the RV actually moved into a new park a couple days ago, so we're going into hiding.
I've seen that rv. It has a polo couch. Amelia, you should think about what life looks like after this. I'm not shacking up with the hardy boys. Sorry, Paul. Email. Email. Oh boy. Remember Gil ? Oh, Gil, bless his heart. He sent me an email this morning. Subject line, follow up question. All caps, of course, boys.
Remember how you helped get a banker access to data from my QuickBooks file by syncing data out to Google Sheets with live flow. That's right. Live flow. Live flow. The banker was so impressed. He referred me to another client of his CFO today. It's like a fractional CFO company where you go in and advise businesses.
And let me tell you, I am loving. I've introduced live flow to a bunch of my clients and it's saving them a ton of time. It's like I'm just a live flow hype man. Now, anyways, my question, I've got a client who struggles with short-term cash. The QuickBooks reports are okay, but I'd like to build some custom projections for short-term cash planning.
Any ideas for how I could set that up? As always, thank you boys Automation show. Woo. That's classic Gil. Cash planning. Any ideas? So I know Live Flow has a bunch of templates you can use. Makes it simple to create a Google Sheet as a starting point that's connected to your QuickBooks. They do, and they've actually got like an account's payable dashboard template I've used before.
It syncs the build data from your QuickBooks file and would probably be a good starting point for cash planning. Yeah, you could use that data to build out a cash planning spreadsheet that shows upcoming bills for the next few weeks. So you're gonna type all that out to Gill? I can email. Where do help desk tools figure into all this?
Are they replaced for inbox rules? Ooh, that's a good question. How have you used Help Desk tools? Chad? So have you used help desk tools in the past? To help departments keep in touch with customers, kind of by department. So main support, payroll support, AP support, tech support, all that kind of stuff.
We've leaned in heavily to the teamwork universe, so kind of. Stayed away from Zendesk and those kind of things, but not because they weren't great. It was just back in sort of 2013 and 14 and 15, there were very few that could embed images in replies. So teamwork was super ahead of the game back then, and you could reply with your gift or reply with your screenshots and they wouldn't be attachments.
How about you? We've pulled it in in situations where, and I think this is the point you're getting. Like it's helpful to have a more pooled approach. So like either one of several team members could reply, or at the very least you want a team to have visibility into like all of the emails of that department.
It's funny enough, we were around that time, we were using Teamwork Desk as well. Uh, some other great things that it was doing for us was you could set up like custom triggers that you could fire from within the app. So we had a series of like web hooks that would get called. Those triggers. Ooh. And the other cool thing about it, back then you had an unlimited number of inboxes.
So we actually had an inbox for every client and then we created these web hook triggers specific to each client. You could just fire it off and it would take that email where it needed to be. Uh, but to bring this back to Paul's question, I think the value for help desk tools is whenever you want to get out of that, like one-to-one personal inbox, which honestly.
Almost always, you know, you want like, visibility across your team and stuff like that. Uh, I think that's where they become really powerful. And then the good ones have like another layer of kind of cool automation tech on top of. Mm-hmm. . So what you're saying is the perfect recipe for using help desk tools and inbox rules together is that inbox rules can be set up automatically to forward in to help desk tools, and then everybody works outta the help desk tool.
Yes. And from personal experience, if you do still have inbox rules like that precede the processing, going to the help desk tool, that becomes a really tangled web because you aren't sure what's doing what. Kind of different functions you can get basically inbox rule functionality from your help desk tool.
So it's not really a question of like, is this going to beef up my inbox rules? It's more about like, how are your squishy human users gonna interact with it? What about Zapier? I know you've talked about Zap your email automation in the past, but I wasn't really listening to that. Should I be using inbox rules or Zapier to automate email?
Good question, Paul. I think this is pretty specific to your own use cases, like almost every answer is, but I think of using Zapier whenever there's a heavy lift or just some things that have to happen after the email comes in that a standard rule wouldn't be able to do. If it's a simple one-two punch where something comes in and it needs to go to a folder, keep that in your email all.
But if you need to parse out some information and reformat some stuff and maybe put it in a database and then save it to the folder, Zapier is your answer. I think of rules as routing and Zapier as parsing and connecting to another app. So all the routing and all that should just be managed with email rules.
That doesn't need to happen in Zapier. He only really pulls app your in when it's time to take some data from that email and put it in another place. So for example, let's say you get a receipt every month from some service that you use and you wanna parse the dollar amount out of that and post it in your accounting system every time.
I would set up a inbox rule in Gmail or Office 365 that says every month when I get this email, forward it to this Zapier address, and then Zapier's gonna parse the amount and post it in the accounting system. But the inbox rule's still set up on the email side. So I guess I think of Zapier as like you only really touch that when you want that information to go somewhere else.
Thank you for the question, Paul. How do I get my colleagues to send me less? Boy, isn't that a, Ooh, that's a good question. You figure this one out. You win the lottery of. Yeah. I can say at like at one point, team chat apps were heralded as the death of internal email. I don't know if that's entirely true or even accurate.
What's your experience been with that, Chad? Depends if you're talking to like a therapist or a worker or somebody else. Everyone has a different opinion on how chat apps affect your, your mental health, right? And your ability to manage multiple, like notifications. I don't know, I'm, I don't want that stuff bothering me too much.
I'm okay with. The chat apps be there. I feel like if something is urgent or it needs a conversation, it goes through a chat app, and then if there's something that's external or needs to be documented well or is part of a project or something like that, it tends to, it tends to live in email. We have a, uh, An internal kind of rule where if people, you know, need an answer where it's one-to-one and it's not meant for posterity or any type of looking back on stuff, conversation based, use the chat app.
So I'm kind of pro Slack. I know most people aren't and they've have kind of gotten away from that kind of life, but I still find it incredibly useful and, uh, get stuff dealt with. Fine. How about you? I have a love-hate relationship with chat. I do think people oftentimes like use them for the urgent things, but to be honest, like 80% of my chat a activity is just pure tom foolery.
So it's really hard to delineate between like, what's that urgent thing I got I need to respond to versus, oh, here's a picture. Steve's cat, . I think the problem we all have with chat apps too, and there are some extensions that help with this is like the ephemeral nature of chat apps where you read a message and you're not gonna come back to it later.
Like there's not really a workflow built around chat messages the same way that there is email where you resolve it when it's done. Yeah. It's very use case. Specific chat apps. I mean the best part of chat apps to me is the fact that you can like build them into workflows and put buttons on things and do all these other things.
Mm-hmm. like kind of build your customer interface. But I will say one of the best hacks I've ever found to receive less email has been to send less email or to not respond to emails you get right away. Mm-hmm. . So if that's a customer email, give 'em a little time to think about it. Uh, I think if you respond right away, you've got like a 20 x chance of them bouncing back another trivial question rather than like just giving them the slightest bit of friction to getting another answer so that they'll actually go through the mental exercise of figuring it out.
So I do think how you send email can be an art form if your goal is to get less email. But yeah, I think we could all do with a little less email in our life. Most of the emails I get now are from apps sending me notifications about things. Oh, that's just the worst. They're not even real people. So in my mind, the emails I get from people should be at a different level, like a different class.
Right? So those services like click up, I love click. But holy geez, like the notifications are outrageous. And then many of these services, you can't get granular enough to only get the thing that you actually want. So people leave 'em all on just in case. One of those things is the thing that they wanted to see.
But then like your inbox is just on fire. Ugh. I was talking to an app over email yesterday and I said, I don't see a setting where I can turn off this system transaction thing. Could you just do that for me, ? And they're like, no, this is important, so it's not important to me. Promise . And they're like, oh yeah.
It is like, okay, so how can I change my email? System, and they're like, well, you're gonna have to do that through us too. It's like, oh. So I think there's a lot of work to be done from apps to increase the customization of the notifications. But I mean, click up does a good job sometimes of letting you choose which types of emails notifications you get.
You see it differently with all the apps out there. So this is where the rules come in, right? So if that one payroll app that's sending you that stuff that you don't want notifications for, set up a filter or a rule to skip the inbox and not bother you. Yeah. So one interesting workaround here, I think.
Having like a service account that all those notification emails go to. Mm-hmm. , and then using Makers app or something like that to then parse those emails and send those notifications where they actually need to go. That's the only workaround I really know to not having the granularity around what things you want notifications on and what things you don't.
So if one of those 10 things is what you actually want a notification about BOL Tent is somewhere where you're not gonna be notified, but then just have a rule to handle the exception. Mm-hmm. , what we've found too is that when we have the inboxes that are the service accounts, and you know, 80% of them are either going into the right Slack channel or the right ticketing system or something, or the right file, they're still 20% where you haven't set up the rule or there's just, it, it, it doesn't exist yet.
So having somebody or a resource there to deal with the fallout of anything that hasn't been actioned. Has been something we've had to deal with for probably closer to a decade. So you've got a dedicated person wrangling that for the team rather than every single person needing to monitor it? That's right.
That way they can keep track of the rules, they can set up the automations, they can make sure the right things are being sent to the right people. Cause sometimes there's some pretty sensitive stuff that goes through. So maybe eyes for everyone is not necessarily the right move, but good points. Yeah, that makes sense.
Everything. All right, Paul? The tunnels are just, It's so weird thinking that this is where my grandfather was when the collapse happened. Sorry, Paul. Let's hope this tunnel doesn't end a pile of rubble. Speaking of where the tunnel ends a ladder,
who's going first? You guys are such wimps.
What do you see? Batteries. A lot of batteries.
Truly a sad. So these batteries should work. Looks like a supply closet.
Um, hi. Uh, hi. Stewart, it was big. Paul, Chad, Jason, you know who that is? You recognize him? No. Automation town. What were you doing in the supply? Got around them. Johnny Five tattoo. Yeah, you, you are guys. To the RV
Automation Town is written and produced by Chad Davis and Jason Staats edited by Paula O'Mara. Keep up with the characters of Automation Town on Twitter @automationtown