Show HN: Caspy – AI Assistant for Emails | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Caspy – AI Assistant for Emails

caspy.com

45 pointssarim42 comments

Anything that gets access to my E-mails and isn't an all-local app with local processing instantly raises a red flag. My E-mail is not something I want out there in public.

A quick glance at the page doesn't tell me if this thing processes my E-mail online, or locally, and what data gets shared where and with whom.

I completely understand your concerns. Your emails aren't sent anywhere; they are processed on our server. We have our own ML model so we don't share any of your data with a third party. Moreover, we don't store the content of your email. We just give emails scores based on various attributes and those scores are used to make all the predictions.

Well, but this means that my E-mails are sent to your server. While I do believe your best intentions, history shows that even the best of intentions do not survive ownership changes, and that breakins do happen.

> Your emails aren't sent anywhere; they are processed on our server.

So, I need to move my email to be hosted on your servers? Because if not, the correct way to the describe what you're doing is: "email is sent to our servers" which is the opposite of: "Your emails aren't sent anywhere".

Do you manage your own servers? Is the answer really, "your email is sent to virtual servers we lease from Amazon" for example?

It's not that trusting (yet another) party with full access to every email is necessarily a deal breaker - but every additional service and ops team that gain access is another potential human error added, that could lead to compromise.

Even compromise of something as trivial as ones email address: I currently get almost all spam to the addresses I used to sign up for Adobe, LinkedIn and Dropbox before they each got hacked in turn.

The only sensible assumption about a new service is that it will be compromised at some point - it's important to be able to evaluate the risks involved. (So you not storing email in perpetuity is good to know. One does wonder how much data might be gleaned from getting a copy of a neural network trained on my personal correspondence for a decade though).

Your emails aren't sent anywhere; they are processed on our server.

They are sent to your server. Which means they are being sent somewhere.

Seriously? Something tells me you picked the wrong crowd to be dissembling with....

> they are processed on our server

So, they are sent to at least three different entities: your ISP, your hosting provider and you.

I had this same basic idea, but have not pursued it very aggressively. Part of what kept me from doing much about it is that I don't expect people to want me to be able read their emails to gain some convenience/efficiency.

On the other hand, the evidence seems to suggest that people will give up nearly any amount of privacy for a little convenience, so everyone but the sort of people who read HN will probably love it if it works well enough.

I'm worried that with another free product like this, we'll get another Unroll.me on our hands.

Don't worry axyjo, its free for early users but we'll turn on pricing soon.

If you're going to charge me a subscription instead of mining and selling (even abstract insights), I'm game. But first you have to promise you'll never mine and sell my inbox.

Mining and selling your Inbox data isn't our business strategy. We have a subscription-based pricing model and we'll turn that on soon (2 months).

I think what is making people nervous would be something like this phrase from your privacy policy:

>We may collect other information that cannot be readily used to identify you, such as (for example) your Email Meta Data and IP address of your computer.

You make clear earlier that you will not sell or rent personally identifiable information:

>If you do provide personally identifiable information to us, either directly or through a reseller or other business partner, we will: not sell or rent it to a third party without your permission

But it is unclear what "email meta data" means and whether or not you will rent or sell anonymized data "that cannot be readily used to identify you". Other questions might include how long you store this information.

@stevesearer Both of those points are there so that we could train our ML Model. But I fully understand people's concerns.

Yeah, I understand collecting data is a part of training your model but it could be worth explicitly saying that zero data (either personally identifiable or anonymized meta data or any data at all) will be sold or rented. And if a change to that policy happens, include in the language of the user agreement that it isn't retroactive and only applies to new accounts.

The vague language is what bothers people. Probably having very strong language in the opposite direction (that you will NEVER sell any data, and would shut down rather than sell it) would probably win you favor.

@stevesearer Both of those points are there so that we could train our ML Model. But I fully understand people's concerns.

Dude, you are being vague when trying to allay peoples' concerns about your vague statements. Not a good sign.

When we ask for you to say "we will never mine and sell your inbox" and you instead say "mining and selling your inbox data isn't our business strategy," I hope you understand why that would make people nervous about using your product.

With all due respect "mining and selling your Inbox data isn't our business strategy" is not the same as "we will never ever ever ever sell or mine your Inbox data". My inbox is too precious for any potential loopholes.

It's not your business strategy today. It's your business strategy next year when you need to get more users and/or get more money per user.

It's also important to note what information some future third party will get access to if/when the company is sold at some later point.

I doubt a ML model trained on personal correspondence can be useful and anomomized.

haha https://clean.email scroll to the bottom ;)

Agreed.

I hate to be a Debby downer, but I'm constantly unsure if I'm happy with Google being able to read my emails, let alone a random company out of nowhere.

It's unfortunate, because there is a huge opportunity for cool things to come out of handing your email over to some company (including this app I'm sure) but the risk right now is just too great.

What happened to Unroll.me?

Edit: nm. This only happened this week, and I missed the news. Just Googled it and found out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...

Hmm. Unroll.me is owned by Slice, I wonder if Slice has a different policy regarding selling aggregate user data (since it also scans your inbox, but to find shipping and delivery emails).

The subsections "Vendors and Suppliers" and "Anonymous Use and Sharing" on section V "How we share your information" are quite vague ...

https://www.slice.com/privacy

How does this differ from Google Inbox? I love Inbox, it has completely changed my email habits. Inbox seems to already solve everything Caspy has, but I could be missing something.

The goal of Caspy is to not just allow users to manage their Inboxes from anywhere in their browsers but to also help them build stronger relationships with Email contacts that they actually care about. It does a bunch of things (copy/pasting for the second time :P): 1. Which Emails are important and need a reply. 2. Which sent Emails require follow ups and what is the best time for a follow up. 3. Which contacts are important to you and which ones are drifting away and need to be reconnected with.

I ask myself the same question.

> manage their Inboxes from anywhere in their browsers

I don't need this feature, I have a pinned tab with Google Inbox and it's one click away like your extension, and usually I deal with mails only when I want to, so it's a focused task that would be fullscreen anyway. You say «Email notifications can sometimes ruin your focus and hamper your creativity», but I would say the best way to stay focused is to consult mails only when decided.

> 1. Which Emails are important and need a reply

Google Inbox is really smart and knows how to classify mails by category without any training (Travel, Shopping, Finance, Social Network, Notifications, Forums, Promotion), and for each category you can choose if A) you want to get notifications when you receive them, and B) If they should be shown grouped in the inbox. Nowadays, if I get a notification for a mail, it means that the mail is of interest. I don't receive anymore notifications for forums answers, promotions mails or notifications, neither on my computer nor my phone.

> 2. Which sent Emails require follow ups and what is the best time for a follow up.

Google Inbox let you use your inbox as a TODO list, where you can mark mails (or groups, as above) as done, which has the same effect has archiving it. Aside the "mark as done" feature, there is also a "snooze until" feature that let you in one click snooze the mail (hide it from inbox) until Tomorrow, This weekend, Next week, a given date, or even a place (looks awesome, I never saw it actually). You can also "pin" mails so they stay on top of your inbox.

> 3. Which contacts are important to you and which ones are drifting away and need to be reconnected with

I don't need this feature from my inbox, but maybe some people do.

So for me Google Inbox mostly solves the same problems, except it is free and you get all bonus points from using Google: Automatically detecting flights and travels mails, showing these info directly in the inbox, easy visualization of mail attachments, Android application of Google Inbox, etc. I don't know if you already tried Google Inbox, but if not you should, it is important to know your main concurrent.

My goal is not to be rude, I'm trying to help you by showing that Google Inbox solves already most of your problems, and people using it will notice that, whatever ways you turn your arguments. Maybe you should direct your arguments more on the «same features as Google, but without Google» side? Some people have concern about Google having all their data, it may be working, but this is just some thoughts that may be helping you. I wish you good luck for your project, I hope you will make it succeed :-)

Seems nice but I don't get where the AI is?

The AI makes the following desicions: 1. Which Emails are important and need a reply. 2. Which sent Emails require follow ups and what is the best time for a follow up. 3. Which contacts are important to you and which ones are drifting away and need to be reconnected with.

It is only AI to a layperson.

It seems like the "AI" is that it "learns" what emails you send replies to.

If it wants to be AI and useful, it should learn how to reply to those emails. This is just another Chrome extension (useful but it doesn't clear my bar of AI)

I mean it's totally AI in that it's an example of weak AI or more precisely it's a type of machine learning. Neither it or anything else we have is any other type of AI, however.

Not a big fan of getting my Inbox managed by AI. I've found AI products to be rather quirky & obstinate at respecting my preferences. Simple tasks require a "learning" before it can be done right. I prefer rules that are predictable.

I can afford to miss out on news feed because it got mis-categorized by AI, but can't take that risk with my Inbox.

How is this AI? Snooze, Reply-to and mute emails? Wow, needs hella brain for that. If-Statements are not AI.

The title is misleading.

Snoozing and muting emails are added functionalities. The AI makes the following desicions: 1. Which Emails are important and need a reply. 2. Which sent Emails require follow ups and what is the best time for a follow up. 3. Which contacts are important to you and which ones are drifting away and need to be reconnected with.

I think it's doing a little more than that:

"Caspy’s AI learns from your email history to figure out what types of emails you send replies to. With that knowledge, it will alert you only when an email needs a reply."

But that's hardly AI. I think even Thunderbird does this, learns that emails I click links in or reply to are important and flag them as such.

Who said that an email that I typically reply to is more important for me to see than one that I typically wouldn't reply to?

These days I cringe when I see 'AI powered' and am wary of products that have it in their marketing lib. Feels like a gimmick due to the hype around AI.

most classical AI research was in fact around symbolic logic which is basically if statements.

There are important emails I never reply to, like Uptime robot notifications. I would still like to be notified.

I like this idea, but most of my email needs relate to work emails, and I don't have permission to share those with a third party. I'd love to try it if there were some way to install the thing locally or have it run from my browser.

:D and again someone wants access to all my emails?

...no thanks.

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