9cays is a group email application developed by the folks at alien camel. 9cays makes it simple to start a conversation between a group of people – the conversation can be viewed and managed via their web application. Think of it as Google Groups light – groups can be created on the fly, and quickly disposed of when done.
If you don’t wish to signup to the service, you can instantly start a conversation with up to 3 participants right from the homepage. If you signup, which is a straight-forward process, you can invite more people into the conversation and expose other features. The aim of 9cays is to organise group communication and to make it much easier to manage than having CC’d addresses in ordinary email. Participants are able to subscribe and view the discussion thread using feeds, and view attachments etc. on the web interface. It is very simple to add a message to the conversation, you send an email to a 9cays.com address that is setup for each group.
In the future 9cays will be adding more functionality and the ability to group these ad hoc message groups under a single account or name. There is also an Outlook plugin being developed. 9cays has been in development for 6 months and they are sticking to their philosophy that there should be an easier way to group ad hoc conversations online.
9cays can fill a gap where temporary mailing lists are required where you would normally have the discussion CC’ing a group of people. This way you can manage the list, view the conversation online and expand the list of participants. The service is currently completely free, for more information visit their blog.