Show HN: MailSlayer - An App Platform for Gmail that makes email awesome again | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MailSlayer - An App Platform for Gmail that makes email awesome again

mailslayer.com

16 pointslem729 comments

MailSlayer is a Chrome extension that plugs in to your Gmail account to add apps that are inline with your Gmail workflow.

It started off as a Customer Service Application called Ticketive, but after we got a lot of user feedback from our Beta, we realized that people were using it way differently than we first expected.

MailSlayer is 100% modular, so you can choose the apps you would like to use and are not forced to use any apps you don't want.

The goal of MailSlayer is to make email better by adding useful apps into your current Gmail workflow so that you don't have to go to another website or service to manage these tasks.

MailSlayer provides a platform for developers who want to add functionality to Gmail, taking care of user authentication, data storage, DOM manipulation, and state tracking (with observable events when the user opens a folder or an email, starts writing a reply, and more).

If they can save me from having to re-invent the wheel when it comes to writing a gmail plugin/browser extension (especially threads and events), then this is potentially very exciting.

I will get Mike (Our CTO) and you in contact about the API! :)

Used Ticketive for a bit, looks like it could be a solid competitor for Rapportive/GMail itself, especially if third-party developers start contributing functionality.

Awesome, thanks for all your feedback and help with Ticketive.

Let us know if there is anything you would like to see as far as apps go for MailSlayer.

Hey everyone, I'm the tech guy who built MailSlayer. If anyone has any questions about the platform, I would love to answer them!

Hey, curious how you integrate with gmail. Is there an API for that? What lessons learned can you share?

MailSlayer integrates with GMail by leveraging a browser extension (currently available for Chrome and soon to be available for Firefox) that injects JS into GMail at runtime.

Google doesn't have an API for GMail, and is on record saying that they have no plans to release one. GMail's JS itself is extremely obfuscated (Google uses their Closure compiler to compress it before pushing to production). Interfacing with GMail has definitely been a challenge, but after some sleepless nights and a bit of luck we have a stable and flexible platform. This is one area where we can offer major time-saving value to developers.

As a startup, we love how easy MailSlayer makes it to keep track of our customers and conversations.. Love it!

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