Hiver

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Build the shared inbox I actually need instead of Hiver — and understand what you are giving up.

**The product is that it is inside Gmail.** A separate application, however good, is a separate application, and that is exactly what the team refused to use. If adoption is the problem you are solving, this trade is the whole decision.

Two routes.

ROUTE ONE: STAY IN GMAIL, USE WHAT IT ALREADY HAS
- A Google Group as the shared address, with collaborative inbox features: assignment and resolution, built in and free
- Labels for state, filters for routing
- **This is free and often enough.** Try it before building anything

ROUTE TWO: BUILD THE INBOX, AND SYNC WITH GMAIL RATHER THAN REPLACING IT

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode, FTS5 over messages
- Gmail API with push notifications, or IMAP IDLE
- Caddy in front

KEEPING TWO SYSTEMS IN STEP, WHICH IS THE HARD PART
- Sync by history id, not by polling for new messages. **Polling loses messages and duplicates them**, and Gmail gives you an incremental history for exactly this reason
- Map your states onto labels, so somebody working in Gmail directly still sees the state, and changes there flow back
- **Decide which side wins on a conflict and write it down.** Two systems both authoritative over 'read' is how a shared inbox becomes untrustworthy
- Store the Gmail message id and thread id on every message, so nothing is ever created twice

THE FEATURES WORTH HAVING
- Assignment as a soft claim, with who has it visible
- Internal notes, visually unmistakable from replies, and never sent
- Collision detection: who else has this open, and a warning before sending over somebody else's draft
- Three states: open, closed, snoozed
- Keyboard-first navigation

SENDING
- Send through Gmail's own API so the message appears in Sent and threads correctly for the customer
- **Do not send through a separate SMTP path** — the customer's replies will thread badly and your team will lose them

REPORTING
- First response time, conversations with no reply, and volume by weekday. Short and honest

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Incremental sync by history id and a written conflict rule. Two mailboxes disagreeing is worse than one mailbox with no features.