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Comment by juandazapata | Hacker News Reader

What's the difference with just checking your email 3 times per day? Personally, I've been checking my email before I start working in the morning, right after lunch, and before I finish my day.

I have the luxury that none of my emails are "urgent" (i.e. I don't work in Customer Support), so I disabled email notifications and just take a look whenever I want.

I'm a little confused as to why one would need such a service.

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My guess? The point is basically to create an aid to break your addiction. Why don't people just stop smoking? Why don't you just decide not to pull out your phone? Why don't you just put down that donut? Sometimes, we need an extra shove or hurdle to break bad habits.

Thanks for jumping in josefresco. Exactly.

Two big reasons we built it: 1. the discipline to only check emails X times a day is unfortunately not one that comes naturally to us, and 2. a large part of our job is replying to and dealing with emails, so we still wanted to be able to be in our inbox (to find the relevant information for a current task), but don't want new emails jumping up and interrupting our flow.

So nice, that feeling, when you get through your batch of emails, and knowing you now have 4-5 hours of un(email) interrupted focus time.

So this is the (choose one) not-free-in-the-future/temporary third-party-server-side equivalent of telling Mail.app/Exchange/Thunderbird to check for new mail every few hours instead of every minute. But those configurations are free and forever without any "we reserve the right to change the terms at any time" bogus ToS. Is that about right?

Some of the advantages vs using your Mail app to do this are:

1. it works across all your devices (as works at the gmail server level)

2. you can set exceptions (e.g. email from mygirlfriend@gmail.com should always arrive immediately)

Took us 10 days to build, and costs us nothing to run. No intention to monetize (we run a BI platform called trevor.io which pays our salaries. Feel free to check it out if you want to support us :) ).

TIL, people can get addicted to email. It's actually pretty interesting, I didn't know that was a thing.

One difference is that this controls your notifications as well. If I decide to only check email 3 times per day, then I have to turn notifications off for that to be effective. This means I may miss emails which need a reply sooner.

Before you let a third-party intercept all your mail (WTF) why not simply use a tool like Llama or Easer or Tasker or anything like that for Desktop to selective enable and disable notifications per app for certain times of day?

How is that different from this? You'd still be missing email that needs a reply sooner.

One useful difference is that you can set exceptions (i.e. email addresses that you want to receive emails from immediately).

Just let them call you if it is urgent?

Right.

E-mail is a substitute for mail, it is not a replacement for phone calls or SMS. (and both phone calls and SMS should be IMHO used parsimoniously by the people needing your attention).

Previous similar themed thread on HN, JFYI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118

I often need to reference something from a previous email while working on a project, but get distracted when I see the new messages waiting for me. Otherwise, I try to only check email 2x or 3x a day similar to you, and notifications are always off.

I personally have the opposite problem - I don't check email enough for the liking of others - and I skim over it at least once daily.

I was going to ask the same. Anyone can disable desktop and push notifications and just set an alarm to check their email three times a day.

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