Ask HN: Examples of email-first projects or startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Examples of email-first projects or startups?

58 pointscucho41 comments

By email-first I mean services that the email is the principal (or only) interface between the service and the user. For example: Posterous before Spaces. Thanks.

View on HN

https://www.paced.email is a service I built to buffer users from email. It aggregates multiple inbound emails into single messages based on a desired cadence. There's a dashboard, but after signing up, there's no real need to sign in as I designed the system to generate aliases on the fly using an easy to remember format.

E.g.

- johndoe@daily.paced.email

- johndoe.hackernews@weekly.paced.email

- johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email

- Or xyz@example.com if you bring your own domain.

The UI came about after being requested so much, but the original interface still stands.

Oh rad. I was just chatting with a friend about how tired we were of having no control over which inboxes gmail has, and what goes into them. This looks like a big step in the right direction.

I am sure OP's service is great, and not to distract from it, but you may also enjoy Sanebox, which has been unsexily solving this exact problem for ages

Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Pretty cool service. If in an existing account, at say github,I was using my personal email, would I have to update my primary email to the one from paced?

Not necessarily! Some users have been creating forwarders in their primary email provider into Paced Email. See this article on the subject with respect to Gmail: https://www.paced.email/articles/how-to-auto-forward-specifi...

Awesome, thanks for the link.

So I signed up for the free tier. There's an option to compose mail that's paylocked. Do I need my own domain for that? If not, i.e if I'm using paced for outbound mail, how are you currently managing reputation management?

Thanks for jumping in. Composing is currently a paid feature, correct. You don't need a custom domain to activate it though, it also works with the in-house paced.email based email addresses.

Our underlying email provider is Mailgun and they handle the reputation. So far so good though, all seems to be working as intended a year and a half after launch.

Get in touch via the site if you want to chat more, happy to help if you have any questions etc.

The landing page says it's $59/year for premium functionality, but the actual pricing page says it's $90/year (which violated my expectations as a customer, unless I misunderstand what's happening.)

Apologies. The pricing is indeed $90/year or $10/month and the marketing site is wrong. However, I’m the coming weeks I’m releasing a new site/branding and more functionality which will fix this. Thanks for pointing it out!

I don't have these any more, but... ~20 years ago I had a 'searchbyemail.com' and 'recipesbyemail.com' service.

SBE would take a term, search/scrape google/yahoo/altavista and return the name/link in an email.

RecipesByEmail was... recipes by email - put 'chicken casserole' in the subject, and we'd send back links to chicken recipes (I think later, I had it send back 2-3 recipes scraped from some open recipe sites).

They never got huge traction, but I remember getting more than a few 'thank you' emails from blind folks. One specifically came from someone who worked in a school for the blind, and he wrote that the search thing was very handy for some students.

I've been building Emailic for the last few months. https://emailic.com

You can use it to drive automation in external apps, without having to leave your inbox. Zapier and other no-code solutions have such integrations, but they are expensive and require access to all your emails. This was something I was not willing to give up, for privacy reasons.

I've currently completed a Webhook (https://emailic.com/apps/webhook/) and Upload to Dropbox (https://emailic.com/apps/dropbox_upload/) integration. Check it out, and let me know what you all think! (Email address is in my profile.)

FYI for something like https://emailic.com/apps/analytics/, I would love to see a demo of what it does.

Working on a couple of demos. Here is a sample of the monthly email the system sends out to one of my demo accounts: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oahcy4264byz9zr/Screen%20Shot%2020...

https://closetab.email - delivers your bookmarks to email every monday, so that your bookmarks don’t go into an endless abyss.

I’ve always wanted to have something like this! Thanks so much!!

https://scottscheapflights.com/

I built an email-powered social network called Uhuro (https://uhuro.com/). I guess it could also be used as a social listserve platform.

Email addresses work like APIs. For instance you can send emails to join@uhuro.com to join the social network or quit@uhuro.com to quit. Other email API addresses include:

- invite@uhuro.com = invites friends and family to join

- help@uhuro.com = Replies with the instructions

- follow@uhuro.com / unfollow@ = Follows or unfollows CC'ed users

- followers@uhuro.com = Replies with all users following you

- post@uhuro.com = Sends your email message to all of your followers.

Here's more information on how it works - https://uhuro.com/how.html

http://ohlife.com was a YC-backed [1] personal journal you maintained by replying to emails, which is super cool IMO.

Although I always thought maybe whatsapp would be a better fit for an interface, so I started building Diarist [2] for a Twilio hackathon. Never finished it though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613137

[2] https://github.com/caruano95/diarist

I built www.emailnewslettertracker.com so I can route emails to my Remarkable2 tablet. It's based on inbound SES and lambda, with a reverse engineering of the Remarkable browser extension. Because of the reverse engineering, I don't really want to bring attention with thousands of users, but if a couple of people wanted access, please feel free to sign up.

I built it because email newsletters are increasingly valuable, and I wanted to read them on RM2.

Hey Travis, I don't own an RM2 but I like newsletters, what are your favorites newsletter ? Thanks

It depends what you mean by email. For example, FWD:Everyone (fwdeveryone.com) allows using the Gmail add-on as the only interface between the user and service. So the user can stay entirely within their inbox, but they aren't interacting with the service by sending or forwarding an email.

Thanks. By email I mean send to an email address, and something happens. FWD:Everyone is more a add-on to a tool (that happens to send/receive emails) than an email-as-interface service.

Almost everything I do with sr.ht is via email.

Source control, issue tracking, CI, mailing lists, documentation, etc.

I made an email-only todo list called Dobby [1]

You send your tasks to dobby@dobbymail.com, and it'll send you a todo list every morning. You can reply to complete, postpone etc.

The point is to not have a separate place for seeing and managing a giant database of todos. You only ever see what's relevant now, and in the place you already look for everything else (email).

1. https://dobbymail.com/

I have built a service for storing email attachments to cloud. https://mailboxfiler.com

Another example: followupthen.com

Moogle.cc is a blogging platform where you can only post using email. If you want to update a post (say, because you found a typo), you have send another email with the correct spelling.

I might have to move away from this restriction though depending on use feedback.

Sample blog - https://dirtydatagirl.moogle.cc (she was front page on HN a few weeks ago)

Can it work without javascript being required?

I'm on flaky 3G and browsing with JS disabled so pages actually load...

I love the concept, how does it differ from say Hey?

It can't work without JS as currently implemented. It's a React app so JS is very tightly coupled with the implementation.

It differs from Hey in that 1. you can email from any email provider like Gmail, Outlook, etc and we make everything look good.

2. It's open source so you can modify and host yourself. GH = https://github.com/moogle-cc/moogle-blog.

3. You can run this on your own domain (which I believe Hey doesn't have as an option unless something's changed in the recent past).

4. You can post downloadable content along with your blogs - so if you want to share a pdf or a worksheet or something with your blog readers, you can do so by attaching the doc to the original email.

(Adding a fifth bullet point because it matters to some people)

5. Moogle comes with its own newsletter AND email marketing service - so it can be your Substack AND MailChimp replacement.

Coming soon:

1. Customisable urls

2. Additional themes and UI

http://www.watchdog.email/

There are events businesses, flash sales, and pop-ups that rely entirely on an email for marketing and communication. Email is good for anything for which exclusivity is a factor.

Naturally, I can't name names ;)

Surprised no one has mentioned Morning Brew: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily

https://publicemails.com

I believe AngelList also started out an email list originally (hence the name).

https://textpost.me is a sms-only journaling/blogging service I made.

I think producthunt started as an email mailing list

https://deathtothestockphoto.com/

Producthunt App sumo

Appcues started with a course

Newsletters like Substack?

Jack's Flight Club: jack@jacksflightclub.co.uk

Substack

Reply on news.ycombinator.com