Show HN: Inbox Zero – open-source email assistant
getinboxzero.com
Clean Up Your Inbox In Minutes
Newsletter management, AI automation, and email analytics.
Inbox Zero is the open-source email app that puts you back in control of your inbox.
getinboxzero.com
The testimonials by "@james", "@yoni", "@ktyr" are pretty obviously not real just from their implausibly short Twitter handles. The actual Twitter handles have different profile pics that simply don't match the ones displayed on the landing page. For example @ktyr is not an Indian male but an Asian girl who hasn't tweeted since 2012.
@prem_saini1 also is not the same person.
@emarky is the same person, but he doesn't seem to have tweeted the testimonial.
As I said, I'm just really bored :)
The Unsplash one is possibly the most suspicious. The others might not be Twitter handles, or the person might not have said it in a tweet.
https://unsplash.com/photos/man-wearing-white-v-neck-shirt-i...
This is not how you build trust. If someone accepts being listed as a review there is no privacy concern, if they do not they shouldn’t be there at all.
So James tells use the tool is legit.. but is he legit himself?
The image isn't his actual face. And @james isn't his real handle.
To fake this quote would be next level creative. That's not what a faked quote looks like.
Every testimonial is real.
Not every testimonial is from Twitter.
Yoni's is from WhatsApp. James' is from Facebook Messenger.
A bunch of the others are from the Product Hunt launch: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/inbox-zero-2
The images/names for some aren't for privacy reasons. Although they'd probably be okay with me replacing those with their real names/images too.
Nice work here but here's where innovation could start with another smart email client in the crowded market. It seems they are all "gmail now and outlook on the roadmap" I know these are common email suites but why not friendly and open protocols like Fastmail's JMAP?
Gmail is also precisely the product that needs this extra functionality the least.
I'm all for open standards, but as a sibling put it, when you're starting out, you may not want to limit your market size, unless you know you're addressing some kind of niche to begin with.
Supporting other email providers would be nice to have. It's open source so maybe someone else will contribute support for other emails before I get to it. It's not the first item on my roadmap. I'd like to perfect the current user experience.
My favorite line in the tech industry.
I think it would be really cool to get it running with something like Mistral in the browser: https://webllm.mlc.ai/
https://github.com/google/cpp-from-the-sky-down/blob/master/...
It is inspired by vim. It downloads all the email snippets and sorts them in descending order by sender and date.
Then you use “j”, “k” to navigate through the emails. You can press “a” for archive, “f” for follow up, and “r” for read through. You can also press “p” to navigate to next email prefix (the stuff before the @) and “d” to navigate to the next domain. Like vim you can combine keystrokes. “ad” will archive all the emails from the present position to the next domain. Since these are sorted by reverse date, often you can look at recent dates and archive the rest.
All operations happen in memory so they are instantaneous. You the press “w” to actually move the messages on the server as a batch operation.
It is really useful if you are getting started or are falling behind and need to quickly classify a few thousand emails.
It is a single 500 line Rust program so you can hack on it to change it to how you like it.
I also had a chuckle that this is a rust app under the cpp-from-the-sky-down repo.
Merlin Mann, "Inbox Zero", Google TechTalks, 2007-07-23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk
My understanding is that he’s grown to be a bit resentful of how the term has been carried away and used, and he cringes/dislikes software that “misuse” the term.
But ultimately the purpose of the tool is to make you more effective at email. Spend less time organising and getting spammed.
Note I’m not affiliated with them, I just enjoy it quite a bit. Here’s a referral code if you want: https://copilot.money/link/oHumEVHZNbPpLVgf9
Phones have made this more inconvenient because it's hard to make 'the app that runs locally' run whenever 'the app that views my email is running'. That means running locally is a big constraint on the UX, for example it probably can't reliably sort emails before my phone picks them up. It's simply the case however that UXes that don't work with local apps aren't viable products to sell to me.
It literally says "if you'd like you can self host it yourself"
I would say I don't consider this a criticism of the product - they're clearly selling a hosted product that they were kind enough to open source, not making a product for end users to run that they happen to sell a hosted version of. It being inconvenient to self host doesn't reflect poorly on them.
A GNU/Linux box supposedly loaded with nothing but software libre is closed source, if it's remote to you and you don't own it. If you send your data to it to be processed, who knows what happens to it.
But I think it’s critical to be precise about this. Open source is still open source, and this designation is still meaningful even if an open source product provides a hosted version. The downsides of letting someone else host something are independent of the the open/closed source status.
I don't think that's too high a standard. There is a Gmail email client, Mimestream, that you have to fully trust to use the Gmail API responsibly. It's gone through an extensive security review from Google's side to be allowed to use that API at a high volume. It was also in beta for a couple years and fixed a ton of bugs and edge cases during that period. There is evidence that a small team was hired which put more eyes and specialized minds on issues.
Mimestream has well exceeded the threshold to be trusted. I think this app could get to the threshold sometime next year if they work and communicate the right way. I kind of doubt they will spend that effort.
That's my opinion as an actual potential user (unlike those wanting it to be made of entirely locally run services, who weren't going to use it anyway.)
Every app that has access to the Gmail API has been through this process including Inbox Zero. But I agree that you can have more trust in products that have been on the market for longer.
The safest way to run the app is to self-host but I agree that's a hassle for most to do.
So I've been thinking to make some sort of similar app to go through my mail metadata and make grouping and rules... "Delete this emails after a week, move all these others just when you receive them, send this others straight to the bin" with some extra smartness added.
As of today, Mailstrom's functionality seems to be the same as 5 or more years ago. Which is not bad-bad, but not enough for me. It seems like the company is focusing on an iPhone app called Chuck [0] that's kind of similar but plus AI and some other stuff. I'll go build my own Lunar Lander.
0 : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chuck-smarter-email-with-ai/id1163872233We can look to add it :)
I fully spec'd out "On the Way" with a buddy of mine. Picking up beer close to your destination? Gas close to your departure point? The inverse? We would have you covered.
We had a path with Google Maps API, and I was convinced that monetization was at least possible enough to get Real Life VC funding.
In any case...this looks like a couple features. Sorry... :(
It was a feature. Google Maps had it implemented to 75% of what we'd spec'd within 9-12 months.
It's not like we'd actually tried, of course. We had full time jobs, for God's sake! But it became abundantly clear to me in that timeframe that FEATURE-sized ideas weren't gonna be viable. The Big Boy Ad Companies were gonna be burning those down for the next few months/years/forevers.
Will look to add local LLM support soon.
- use rules to move automated emails to sub-folders - anything that requires work or a response goes to an "unhandled" folder - anything else in inbox goes to archive after I've read it
I'd have loved to have made it a full fleshed app like this. Kudos!
Get it right, I’ve seen this so many times that people use proprietary web platform synonymously with email.
But such unstructured bunch of emails is hard to manage, if any subset is to be handled over to another person or to be archived in some other environment. Furthermore size limitations for the inbox will force you to get rid of something earlier or later. And there is no fun in going through thousands of emails from years ago. Therefor I recently started to at least using a rough structure of folders for archiving (all mounted as sub-folders of Inbox and therefore searchable at a glance).
Some categories (ToDo, Waiting for result etc.) I'm realizing by categories in Outlook. This is quite handy to follow-up as search-queries for those categories and more can be pinned as virtual folders in Outlook.
However, I wish there were more tools in Outlook for categorizing emails while leaving them all in the same place. I'm not sure whether I ever will become an exemplary user of Inbox Zero or even reach this state.
You have to log into that account find the preferences panel which controls the spam and uncheckbox something or whatever.
Is this managing throwaway mail aliases?
The unsubscribe link included a cookie in the URL which identified what is being unsusbscribed. Only the e-mail recipient would reasonably follow that link. And yet captcha in your face.
Can you go into some more details on this? What security process, exactly?
I had always intended to add labels to it but never got around to learning Pearl to do it.
I'm curious what's the opinion of people here about both pricing model
Is there a multiplier or an absolute number that will make you switch ? (Not specifically for this product)
If you care deeply about privacy then the best thing to do is self-host.
the AI feature to automatically reply would be helpful.
Gmail's "stars" are an OK solution, but I tend to forget to unstar things when they're done, so I need to periodically do star-cleanups. And copy pasting tasks from my inbox into some other specialized todo tool has never really been worth the trouble. The todo apps just aren't integrated enough with the rest of my E-mail based workflow. And there's never a point where I'm not waiting on someone so I never really get to zero.
Why are you the intermediary? Could you instead just connect Alice with the right person (in this case Bob) and they can work through the detail? Why play telephone?
It's good to use your domain knowledge to make the company run more smoothly. It's not so good to become the chokepoint, or the company directory.
the web interface also has an add to tasks button if you use their latest todo list app, but i haven't found it all that useful
But that doesn’t work for people using Gmail.
Inbox 20,000 makes sense for a lot of people btw. Depends on your work and how important being organised with your email is to you.
Many people just declare email bankruptcy and don't care.
If you are on a very high number of emails, you can just archive the last 19,800 and go from there. And then unsubscribe from a lot of your key email offenders.
Which is fine. Put them in a To-Do folder. The original formulation of Inbox Zero suggested three actions:
1. Take care of the e-mail right now. Then archive it.
2. If you can take an action, but not right now, move it to “Follow Up”.
3. If you need someone else to take an action, move it to “Hold”.
It’s _Inbox_ Zero, not e-mail zero. Get the inbox – the place for unprocessed things – empty. Get it empty by processing the things. Then go do something other than e-mail.
Unprocessed emails = "Collection Bucket"
Follow Up folder = "Projects" list
Hold folder = "Waiting For" list
Except with GTD you do this with not just emails but also text messages, DM's, snail mail, personal lists you've jotted down, etc. It's a life organization system.
Task
Event
Message
Contact
Reference
Item
Location
Blueprint
Log
IMO, the above entity 'types' are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories (any concept or thing you can think of fits neatly into only one, and they should never be conflated or confused with each other). I think it is important to keep their identities very clear and very separate.
I.e., Task =/= Message and I think a system that recognises that is usually better (but, each to their own).
Sender = Contact
Email = Message
Recipient = Contact
Email may contain an invite to a meeting = Event
Meeting room, coordinates, address or whatever of the meeting = attach Location
Email may ask you to do something before meeting = derive a Task
Audit trail item of you archiving the email = Log
Email Template that you use in your reply = Blueprint*
Rule to send an email at a certain time = Blueprint*
* Blueprints are just nested conditionals if you think about it... The subtype 'Templates' are nested conditionals without* a trigger IF (it's just a 'do', not an 'if then do'), and the subtype 'Rules' are nested conditionals with* a trigger IF (if else etc. then do)
If you bring in more dimensions you end up with something like a taxonomy where an email contains a message and maybe also a todo or something else and may have more attributes around those identities. Then you can filter by those. I do not use that personally but I see there is no reason to define an email as a todo item.
Also, as an email is just a storage for data, you could (mis)use it as a storage backend for a file system (see fuse) or backup solution.
So an email can be everything you want.
An email is always a message, nothing more. Tasks, events etc. can be derived from it, but the email itself is not a task or event. This isn't arbitrary, these boundaries are clean as heck (again of course, with the 'IMO' caveat. I don't care to convert anyone here).
If I pull up a contact 'MyClient' I can see every entity that's ever been related to it.
- What contacts (customers, employees, suppliers) it has.
- What locations (sites, warehouses, drop ship locations, digital locations) it has.
- What tasks (projects, todos) there are. I see 'service board implementation' which is an old project on 'Completed' status there right now, for example. And if I drill into that project, then I can in turn see every entity that was ever linked to it.
- What messages (emails, phone calls, etc). there are. Phone calls, SMS etc. are not integrated yet.
- Blueprints (e.g. 'Monthly vendor reconciliation 3rd day of every month'). auto rules not implemented yet, I'm manually clicking a 'load in template' button.
- Etc.
I can also view(/filter/etc.) by entity Status.
- 0. New
- 1. Respond (Something has changed, e.g. a customer has replied into it. Attention is needed).
- 2. Active <-- this position is not a hill I am prepared to die on. Personal preference.
- 3. Waiting (on external)
- 4. Hold (no action to take until specific date)
- 5. Evaluate (no further action needed apart from analysis+closure)
- 6. Cancelled
- 7. Complete
So everything actionable floats to the top, and everything non-actionable sinks to the bottom. When an entity becomes actionable, it then automatically floats to the top (e.g. 'EmployeeA was supposed to have provided reportX by now. Followup'.)
But basically, 2 clicks to create an entity. 3 moves to relate an entity to another entity. Automatic entity creation from different services into Supabase (Gmail, working on MSGraph, etc.), with server side triggers & functions to process and automate.
I can view the entity-relationship graph via 'displays' (not all implemented yet):
- Pods (drag and drop widget grid)
- Kanban
- Form
- Table
- Calendar
- Map
- Json
- CPA / Nodes
- etc.
So it's just a representation of my brain that saves a lot of time (especially in tracking things down) and augments my own abilities.
I am working on using this in a B2B product (an ERP for MSPs is the primary use case).
I consider every ticketing system, ITIL service board app, todo app, messaging system, Jira, PM application, ERP, etc... To be completely missing the big picture.
As soon as someone has implemented both a 'Customer' and a 'Supplier' table in a RDBMS, I think an opportunity has been missed and that we have not realised how refined relational db tech has become in the last 10 years. I consider us to need a generalist 'Hub' structure that other services interface with. Self hosting option vital. I have formal data structure training (relational database design, yes a lot of UML historically, set theory), consider this abstract level of the space to be slightly more objective than others do, and have the hubris to consider myself qualified. But, I know that I would not be able to convert everyone to my way of thinking - Nor do I have the time or the inclination. I just love thinking about data structures.
Security & Encryption on row/property level = possible but significant challenge to keep performant (But I suggest that it is feasible, even in 5+TB tables). Limited stress testing so far has had surprisingly good results. Due to atomic entity-relationship granularity, it makes selective role-access very powerful. The problem then becomes the shape of the graph (the structure itself - not the data - of the graph, if exposed, could imply information and is a huge security risk). The other major risk is dynamic querying.
Data should be siloed to the extreme. Added benefit of making hosting changes hot-swappable. Go self hosted in (almost)singleclick. each 'space' needs own tables (own schemas not really relevant for security). Also added benefit for performance. 'sharing' is 'opt-in' (with caveat/nuance for automation), and explicitly 'crosses the border' to go outside of a space. This is at the cost of inter-space queries, but that's a necessary loss. All current solutions on the market fail security sniff tests.
Very eager to get local LLM hooked up to my personal graph for natural language querying (I think my dataset+datastructure is the most appropriate I have ever seen, for this. AI totally outside of my wheelhouse though), but it won't bubble up to the top of priorities for a few months at least
I went with the latter, so now if an email requires action but not immediate, I add it as a task in omnifocus and link to the email. It’s not perfect, but it least it’s a step towards consolidating my todo list for email.
I did go with a label/folder todo approach initially, but I found myself just hating to go there.
That way starred emails are front and center instead of buried in another folder
I can easily see them adding more and more features which improve email and nudge users to inbox zero.
I think this is a decent starting point, and for a repo that is only 5 months old, it looks like they've done a decent job of understanding a good UX, and showing the user the emails they are most likely going to want to archive, etc.
The overall goal of the app is to help manage email better. It could turn into a full fledged email app one day too.