Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

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Hey HN,

Glider co-founder here. We hated how existing email clients treated an email from Paul Graham the same as newsletters and twitter notifications. Gmail's priority inbox tried to fix this problem by filtering out "unimportant" emails, but messages from different contexts were still being mixed together.

We think the best solution is to group emails by sender and context (people, notifications, mailing lists, etc). For example, if I'm a power-seller on eBay, my PayPal notifications are top priority, but I still don't want to see them alongside emails from friends. You already know what types of emails are important to you, so we designed Glider to allow you to easily see that information without having to create an intricate system of labels, filters and folders.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on email. We're looking for honest feedback, so please feel free to tear our idea apart. Is this something that you (or someone you know) would use? Thanks!

Neat. Glad there are still people not treating email as a solved problem. I tossed my address in for an invite.. Meanwhile.. Is there a security whitepaper or writeup somewhere? Handing over the keys to your email account isn't something I'm eager to do without some confidence in your product :)

[Edit] Also... please paste the "if sender == 'pg@ycombinator.com':" condition that I want to believe is in your codebase.

Security is one of our top concerns, and we're looking into different ways to make it as airtight as possible. We'll have more info on security before we launch.

At the moment, we're integrating through GMail through their API, so you can revoke access at any time, and we never see your password.

Hey, GMail doesn't have a public API does it? Could you tell us a bit about how you integrate with gmail, I thought they kept it pretty locked down?

You mean other than SMTP or POP? Those are both definitely public APIs.

And you can set separate passwords for various applications if you enable two-factor authorization.

Those also require your password, as far as I'm aware.

Baudehlo is correct. Gmail provides a SASL extension called XOAuth that allows you to authenticate IMAP/SMTP with OAuth tokens.

Well, that's cool.

Yes, you OAuth and then you can use IMAP with XOAUTH login.

but you must still store the emails in your own database correct? or do you never store them at all?

Same. I don't like each and every proposed solution that all the recent email clients have, but I live a life which, like it or not, involves a hell of a lot of email. So against all odds, seeing people trying to seriously tackle email from different angles is exciting.

I had a long conversation with a friend over lunch once where we both started by imagining a severely improved client, and eventually concluded that once you had traction with that the real benefits would come from a severely improved protocol. A lot of what makes email suck seems pretty baked into it historically.

Yeah, I agree. We came to a similar conclusion and that's definitely one of our long term goals.

Your landing page is nice, but I'd really like to see a proper screenshot available.

Did the tilted screenshot on the homepage show up? We had some JS issues earlier.

Here's a full screenshot of our current iteration just in case: http://i39.tinypic.com/xfug5d.png

yes, the tilted screenshot showed up, but a link to a proper screenshot would still probably help your sign-ups.

A video could be nice either.

In the abstract sense of having an electronic personal secretary that knew me well sort my email for me, yes!!! Absolutely yes and I'd pay $20/mo without blinking.

That said it appears a non-trivial classification / UI problem on a few fronts. Good luck :)

iOS apps would be awesome since I think that is where email is still suffering the most and where seeing the most important/relevant messages first matters most.

I sent a note via the website about parsing Amazon delivery notes for shipment tracking numbers, then pulling in delivery dates via FedEx/UPS etc APIs and displaying it inline in the message list (maybe even optionally in a sidebar widget, list my currently in-transit Amazon receipts).

I think that could be really interesting, and similar concepts applied to various services/notification emails.

Thanks for the feedback! We think that'd be an awesome feature as well. We've been looking into parsing automated emails from common senders (ie. amazon, twitter, etc) to display them in a more appropriate and useful manner, similar to what you've described.

This is fantastic! I've yet to find a client, web-based or otherwise, that even compares to gmail, which is a pretty low bar, IMO. It's 2012 and we haven't even solved this problem yet?

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