AffinityLive Sync Creates A Giant Shared Inbox For Your Entire Team Or Company

One of the most frustrating things that can happen at work is finding out that an important email is locked away in a colleague’s inbox, and you can’t get a hold of some crucial information until that colleague comes back online. That’s a problem that startup AffinityLive is trying to solve with its new product AffinityLive Sync.

CEO Geoff McQueen describes Sync as “Yammer combined with Dropbox combined with Splunk,” all on top of a giant shared inbox. As analogies go, it’s a bit unwieldy, but the idea is that Sync serves as storage, while also allowing users to search for, interact around, and analyze data about relevant emails.

The easiest way to set up AffinityLive Sync is to just automatically forward all of your emails to the service. Then, Sync will check each of those emails against a list of the company’s sales leads or other important contacts. Any correspondence with someone in the contact list gets saved in the program. For example, if different parts of the company are all working with a single client, they can just look at the latest correspondence in Sync to keep up-to-date on everyone’s progress, and download any attachments they might need.

One of the most appealing parts of the new product is how little work it seems to require. Once users have set up the initial integration with their email accounts, everything just runs in the background. Each team member can visit the site as often or as rarely as they want, and it’s still useful for those who do.

The one thing you might have trepidation about is sharing all of your email with your entire team or company. Note, however, that AffinityLive Sync should be set up to capture only outbound emails with a select group of clients (not, say, an email you send to your coworker complaining about your boss). You can also look at all of your emails that AffinityLive has saved and mark any of them as private, removing them from the system.

The product provides some basic analytics right now, showing general email activity for the team and individual employees. Over time, McQueen says he wants to add more data services.

“This is the application layer on the biggest big data in the world today,” he says.

AffinityLive Sync is available for free, but you need to pay if you want more storage. For 500 TechCrunch readers, McQueen is offering free accounts with 4 gigabytes of storage and 4,000 emails (that’s double the standard) — just sign up here.