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Comment by rikkipitt | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on pacing emails to a more manageable, calmer schedule. I'm doing it with essentially a UI-less system which is a rather fun way to produce an app. It simply requires a user to update their email of the website that emails them too frequently with a paced.email alias. E.g.

  johndoe.shopify@daily.paced.email
  johndoe.stripe@weekly.paced.email
  johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email

At the end of each period, a single email is sent to the real email address containing all of the messages the alias received over that timeframe.

https://www.paced.email

I'd love to hear how you'd use it.

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That's a neat idea.

> At the end of each period, a single email is sent to the real email address containing all of the messages the alias received over that timeframe.

Why not send each received mail individually? If you aggregate them first, it makes it very difficult to reply to individual messages with standard email clients.

Good question lqet, thanks. I did create a version that added each message as an EML file to the email with links to each file too. Perhaps a cunning combination of the two variants might be the way forward. Appreciate the suggestion, it's a good one.

I second the "delay-then-send" approach. Don't bother with a digest. Just hold email until the scheduled time then release them. Might want to put suitable intervals or you might get zinged for spam or otherwise throttled. You've probably hit that already.

I use a similar but far less fancy approach with email filters: I have everything put into its own filtered folders then only check them on a schedule.

Your approach is good because the schedule is right there in the email address.

Thanks, rs23296008n1. I toyed with the idea of a send in one hit approach, but feel it will be counterproductive to having a calm inbox. Getting 5, 10, 50 emails in quick succession would certainly raise my stress levels. Perhaps I can offer two or three digest variations... 1) all in one as it is now (plus eml) 2) burst.

Food for thought.

Maybe have a dispatch interval. The weekly-on-tuesday emails get sent one every 5 minutes starting at some time.

Very good. I’m noting all these suggestions down. The app only launched a few days ago. I wanted to make sure it was a valid product first before doing too much to it. I’ll gradually add more functionality and examples over time.

Sounds like you have your mvp and have an incremental plan going forward. Good. The thing is out in the world - that is something a lot of folks don't do.

I'd imagine this is most useful for things that send frequent read-only emails. Someone personal that you would want to reply to they would presumably get your normal address

I haven't used this. But i see the utility. Wouldn't having an admin UI to map ids to periodicity be better than using a hard coded subdomain? That way one can prevent bad actors from switching pace when they come to know of this site. I could also up or lower pace for an id while not having to go through the hassle of changing my mail id.. Also, doing that would let you sell the solution for use with custom domains.

I mean use github@johndoe.paced.email And have an admin ui that lets you set "github@johndoe.paced.email" =>"weekly"

These are some great suggestions. I'm starting to think about how I could use custom domains etc. I need to figure out the next steps for the app and what people would be prepared to pay for such a tool. Ideally, I'd like to keep everything simple when it comes to pricing and not have functionality based tiers. Not sure yet.

I like how this is done, I'd suggest forwarding to another existing email address, for example: johndoe_AT_gmail.com@weekly.paced.email

Then you don't even need a website.

I think there's a balancing act between making it memorable enough and simple enough. Great suggestion though, noted! Hacker News is incredible. A spectacular hive mind for mulling potential ideas over.

Great idea. My suggestion: why not use the Gmail-style johndoe+spotify@ suffix? Just because people would be more used to it. That way johndoe@ also would work.

An irritatingly large portion of websites don't let you put + in email addresses.

I ran into an issue where using the + notation required me to create a whole new account on airbnb because I had forgotten that I used + in my original email.

Thanks thewarpaint. Good point. Having read the below counterpoints though, I'm not quite sure now! I'll look into it.

On second thought they have a point, I have never had an email address with a dot being rejected, but I've seen it for the plus alias several times.

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