New Basecamp Features: Reply to a message via email and more

This weekend we pushed live one of the top Basecamp requests of all time, plus some other related improvements.

You can now post comments to a message via email

Prior to this update, you had to log in to Basecamp to post a comment on a message. We sent you an email notification, but replying to the message required a log in.

Now you can just reply to a message or comment notification by email and your comment will be posted to the project.

At the top of new message and comment notification emails you'll see this:

--- Reply ABOVE THIS LINE to post a comment to the project

Anything you type above that line will be posted back to the project as a comment on the message. This is especially useful if you're on a mobile device (Blackberry, iPhone, etc) and you want to reply without having to log into Basecamp over a slow internet connection.

Note that you can only reply to the message in plain text -- images or files attachments in your email will not be posted to the project. If you need to upload a file in your reply you'll still need to log into Basecamp.

Project updates on every email notification

UPDATE: We have pulled the feature for now. It will make its return in another form down the road. Thanks for the feedback.

People have been asking for a way to stay better connected to their Basecamp projects without having to log in (or check RSS feeds as RSS feeds are too techie for many people). As mentioned above, this is especially useful for folks on mobile devices.

To these ends we've added a footer at the bottom of every email notification that includes the latest changes to the project. This is the same data that's displayed on the Overview screen inside the project. The information is listed at the end of the email so if it's not useful to you it won't get in your way. But if you are curious about what's new in a project all you have to do is scroll down the email and check out the last 25 updates. A direct link to the overview screen is also provided. It looks like:

A revamped message/comment screen

We recently launched a message board in our Backpack intranet product. The messages screen layout inside Backpack was preferred to the Basecamp messages/comment screen layout. It was cleaner, tighter, and comments didn't wrap under the avatars. So with this release we've moved the Backpack messages layout over to Basecamp. We think it's much improved.

Adding files to messages/comments is faster

Attaching files to messages/comments requires fewer clicks now. It's subtle, but saved clicks add up. We think you'll notice the improvement over time.

Clarified email notifications block

We've also clarified the email notifications block when posting a new message. Better wording and clearer instructions make it more obvious what happens when you post a new message or comment.

We hope you enjoy the improvements

We're really thrilled about these improvements — especially emailing-in comments. We hope you find these changes as useful as we do. Thanks again for your continued support!