Groove

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Build me the shared inbox that replaces Groove.

The design brief is restraint: **a shared inbox fails by becoming a help desk.** Statuses, queues and automations are exactly what makes a small team stop using it.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode, FTS5 over messages
- IMAP or a mail webhook inbound, SMTP outbound
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- conversations: id, subject, requester_email, assignee_id, state, opened_at, last_message_at, closed_at — **three states only: open, closed, snoozed.** Resist a fourth
- messages: id, conversation_id, direction, author, body_text, body_html, message_id, in_reply_to, references_json, at
- notes: id, conversation_id, author, body, at — internal, never sent, and visibly different on screen
- viewers: conversation_id, user_id, at — for collision detection
- drafts: conversation_id, user_id, body, updated_at

EMAIL DONE PROPERLY
- Thread on Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References. A reply token in the address as a fallback. Subject matching only as a last resort and strictly
- Quoted history stripped for display, kept in storage
- Auto-replies detected by header and never reopening a conversation
- Outbound from your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, References set so the customer's client threads it

COLLISION DETECTION, THE FEATURE THAT JUSTIFIES A SHARED INBOX
- Show who else has the conversation open, and show when somebody is typing
- **Warn before sending if another draft exists.** Two people replying to one customer with different answers is the specific problem a shared inbox exists to solve, and most homemade versions forget it
- Assignment as a soft claim, not a lock — locking annoys people and they work around it

THE INTERFACE
- Keyboard-first: next, previous, reply, note, assign, close, snooze. A support person lives here all day and the keyboard is the whole ergonomics
- Notes visually unmistakable from replies. **The worst possible bug in this product is an internal note sent to the customer**, so make them different colours, different positions, and require a different key
- Snooze until a date, which is how a small team handles 'waiting on them'
- Saved replies with a shortcut, expanded inline and editable

REPORTING, DELIBERATELY SHORT
- Median first response time, conversations opened and closed per week, and the count with no reply at all
- Four numbers. **A small team does not need a dashboard, it needs to know whether anything was dropped**

WHAT NOT TO BUILD
- Queues, priorities, SLA policies, automation rules. Each is a reason for somebody to stop using it. If the volume grows enough to need them, that is the moment to move to a help desk

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Collision detection and the unmistakable note-versus-reply distinction. One prevents two answers; the other prevents the wrong one going out.