Show HN: Screenr – Automated Workflow for Your Email
feval.ca
feval.ca
A few things I've done: use it to ignore my email except for a small number of senders while I'm working, viewing only starred messages the majority of the day, and copying email threads as html documents inside a project folder. There's something nice about being able to look at an "email inbox" that's a plain html page with six messages.
My idea is to be able to manage my mail through thunderbird but also have the ability to hook in with python (and SQL is the way)
Do you have a write up or some examples anywhere (I'm trying to learn Godot at the moment so any shortcuts would be so useful!) ?
In Thunderbird, go to Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Directory.
That opens your profile directory. In there is a file global-messages-db.sqlite that holds all your messages. Treat that as read-only. If it does get messed up for some reason, you can delete it. It's an index that will get rebuilt.
If you close Thunderbird, you can open the db in sqlitebrowser to view the tables. Some tables I've used for queries:
folderLocations - tells you the id of each email folder
messages - metadata for each message
messagesText_content - subject, recipients, body of each email message
conversations - info about your email threads that can be matched with data in messages to retrieve full email threads
For personal email though I wanted this to work regardless of the client - got Thunderbird on my personal laptop, a webmail on my work computer and k9 on my phone ; so just client side wasn't enough
Are you talking about "global-messages-db.sqlite" ? From cursory googling, that's only an index.[1] The default storage for Thunderbird is mbox format not SQLite.
When I experiment with some SQL queries on "global-messages-db.sqlite", I notice that many of my gmail emails are not in that index cache.
[1] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2861483*
Purely because I'm curious, as a user who might end up doing this: are those messages perhaps not synced locally? And/or if you delete the cache and rebuild, do they appear? Or are there just some kinds of messages that intentionally don't appear in that index?
Sanebox works by logging into my mail server, not replacing it. I have three "send" addresses, and I've learned the hard way that I must authenticate through the SMTP server that goes with the address I'm claiming, or risk being classified as spam by my recipients' email servers. Of course, various email programs allow one to assert any return address one likes. It is a mistake to use this feature. Particularly if one is more tech savvy than one's recipients, it is all too easy to blame them when your mail goes to spam. No, it's your fault. I was that idiot.
Similarly, Qualtrics will send out surveys for colleges and businesses, but won't use the business domain without extra steps. Those surveys don't get read. My college was making this mistake, till I pointed it out. Qualtrics has clear instructions on fixing this.
So Hey is clearly not ready for market, if it can't support its users correctly using business domains for business matters. This isn't a matter of waiting till one's employer signs on with Hey; anyone using Hey who is employed is going to hit this issue.
This type of system requires a mindset that involves multiple parties, not just the receiver, so it becomes a non-trival exercise when considering the attention of multiple parties using multiple email systems.
In a practical sense, we looked at adding a multi party reputation system to the email standard which would involve adding meta data to emails to indicate the "trust" level between the recipients. There are clearly quite a number of technical challenges for this type of system. Fastmail seems to be doing some interesting work in this space.
https://fastmail.blog/2015/12/17/the-endless-battle-against-... https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-2.1.1
It has some limitations but mostly it was useful to learn that google app scripts are a thing.
A feature I'd like along with this (although I realise this breaks the paradigm of only accepting email you actively want) would be to let unwanted people email me provided they completed a certain amount of mechanical Turk effort up to a suitable standard (ie you'd have a handful of known good values interspersed and see that they gave the expected scores). For some it could be a direct earner of a very modest but for me it would be directly useful for various ML projects. If you had a really inflated self image, you could have those you really didn't like get a higher target (whether that was communicated would be a interesting point)
Re: your mechanical turk idea, my email provider actually has something like that: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/1144Docs/BoxTrapper - however there are so many use-cases where I think this would block some email I actually want (like my kid's school, my MD, ...) that I never dared doing it.
It also moves all email from that sender that has been classified previously as well ; although it will not move the mail in folders for which you use a "screening folder" (i.e. if you use an intermediary folder used only to tell Screenr where to classify email) by design. The reason is that I wanted to be able to allow a behavior where mail gets classified as a best guess, but you can move email manually if need be. The best example is the "papertrail" folder I'm using: it receives all the order confirmation, invoices and such automatically, but sometimes I'm also putting similar emails my wife is forwarding me ; but I don't want screenr to classify her as papertrail - so I use a "Classify in papertrail" folder which is only used for me to tell the tool where it should land.