If you've read the last few posts here, you already know that I've been selling LEGO minifigures for a while now. On the side, as a hobby, with a regularity I can't quite explain myself.

What you don't see coming: you suddenly find yourself dealing very intensively with selling platforms. And in Germany, there's simply no way around Kleinanzeigen ^[1]. The problem: writing messages in the web app is awful.

Once you're juggling ten conversations at the same time, you lose track of everything. Users can change their names, messages you've already read slide out of sight far too quickly, and the scroll list only shows the most recent conversations anyway. On top of that come various other UI and UX traps that make both reading and writing needlessly exhausting. Who hasn't replied yet? Who have I already quoted a price to? What's actually been sold? No idea.

So I did what you do as a software developer in a situation like this: I wrote my own Chrome extension that cleans up the whole inbox.

What it does:

• Archiving – finished conversations are out of the way, but not gone
• Marking who I've already contacted
• Setting labels to sort inquiries
• Seeing at a glance what's still open and where I'm still waiting for a reply
• Marking sales as such
• A new layout that uses the full width and height of the page instead of squeezing messages into a narrow column
• Seller information right next to it – including my own notes

The whole thing now feels less like Kleinanzeigen and more like an actual mailbox. And it saved me so much frustration that I decided not to keep it to myself: the extension has now been submitted to the Chrome Web Store.

👉 Kleinanzeigen Inbox+ on the Chrome Web Store

Maybe someone else out there has the same problem. And if so: feedback, feature requests and bug reports are always welcome – ideally on Mastodon.