Show HN: Your Email Assistant in the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Your Email Assistant in the Cloud

tray.io

22 pointswaldr27 comments

Hey, I'd love to hear your feedback on our startup (launching outta LDN), Tray is a cloud service focusing on email, it allows you to define rules on your inbox and intelligently handle incoming messages (think an advanced iffft specifically for email).

Please drop a comment below or email me: rich@tray.io, I'd love to hear of any specific functionality you'd like to see in the product, or generally any thoughts on our approach.

nb we are taking a lean approach to help validate the idea so your feedback is crucial!

How are you integrating with mail services? Are you able to connect to Exchange 2007?

Do you support sending text messages natively, or is that covered as a 3rd party webhook/service?

Are you able to read subject lines and take action based on them?

We connect to Gmail using their XOauth IMAP implementation, which we hope will become more standard in the future, but for now other services we are mainly using native IMAP connection, so you will have to give us your username/password (we are working on making this as secure as possible).We are also planning to offer exchange support, but this is very much work in progress.

Text message support will be native using twilio, and we are also planning native mobile apps to perhaps integrate more deeply with push notifications etc.

As for emails, we are able to read all of the email content including headers, and as a user you will have the ability to trigger actions based on any sort of regular expression as well.

Nice idea, but the first thing that comes to my mind is there is nothing on the landing page that puts my privacy concerns to rest. I see that you mention you won't do anything shady with my data, but that is only mentioned once I click through a few pages. Maybe a small link on the homepage detailing your privacy terms and use of my data. Remember, email is one of the most privately guarded possessions one can have on the internet. It isn't something I will give random services access to without some serious vetting prior.

This is very true, thanks for reminding us... Privacy is obviously a huge issue, if we are going to be accessing your emails, so you're right we do need to make it a bit more obvious that the service is completely secure.

We would never store any of your emails on our servers, we would only store your oauth token/secret (with Gmail) or your login details (if using another provider).. The rules engine would be a black box where the email simply goes in one side and actions are triggered out the other side so to speak...

Hey, best of luck to you. Here's what I wondered (as a gmail user) when I got to the landing: how is this different from the rules in gmail? Are the rules good enough to give access to my email?

Thank you. The rules you can set within the platform give you a lot more power, firstly you are able to hook into web services i.e Twilio and push messages that fit a certain criteria straight to your phone. You'll also be able to trigger auto responders based on the behaviour of your inbox i.e if the volume of your inbox dramatically increases you'll be able to set a responder that lets senders know you are being swamped.

Again these are specific uses of the platform, having the ability to analyse your mail and act on it regardless of clients/device opens up a lot of options for really putting your inbox to work.

what's LDN?

London (sorry for shorthand!) - we are currently on one of the accelerators in the google campus.

I think it's pretty cool, but this is less of a product than a feature, and it's not something I'd be willing to spend money for.

Based on the three use cases you describe on the website (I dont know... there may be more?), if this product took off, Google could kill it by adding time-based filters and availability-based filters (which could possibly tie in with a user's GTalk's status).

thanks for the feedback! we won't be just limited to gmail (but yes google could roll out these specific features). The idea is that it works as a platform for you to setup your own channels based on your email habits, you can use the web hooks to tie into services you already use and help automate your existing processes.

The features we've adding on the landing page are examples of how it can be used, rather than specifics.

I love the idea but I think it could go even further in terms of rules. If it could do a bit more I'd pay.

I'd love for it to put attachments into Dropbox (maybe sort by sender or file type).

If the message is under a certain amount of characters then text it to me by Twilio and I'll reply.

If I don't read a message from my boss after a certain amount of time call me.

Bingo! You've made my day.. this is exactly as the service is intended. In fact our first ever rule was the exact text message scenario you've described.

I think this looks great, especially if you build the product as more of a platform rather than simple rules/filtering.

Such as deep integration with other services, which you hint at with the use of 'pocket'.

Hi, looks nice, I do not know if I would use it. But I'm sure someone would. I would like to know more about password protection. I mean how do you secure my password?

Password protection is a good issue. Obviously its not as simple as a native web application where we can just hash the users password so never actually store it in plain text.

For Gmail users we can use XOauth, which helps, but for other services we will have to store login details somewhere. We are currently working on a way of encrypting the passwords that are stored in case of security breaches, but its definitely not an easy task at the moment (our private alpha is just using Gmail users).

Edited: wrong response :)

I love the idea but why have you posted here? There's nothing to show besides a (very pretty) landing page... :(

Fantastic! We are following some of the lean principles in order to help validate our idea before we head too far down the development path (great post here - http://theagileplanner.com/blog/building-agile-planner/buffe...). The feedback we've had has been great so far, but we really want to find out if there is any specific functionality that is best focused on.

Getting feedback from HN is vital in helping us shape the beta.

So... You haven't actually made anything besides the marketing page?

We have developed an alpha of the basic platform with a few rules that we wanted to use ourselves (therefore not strictly following lean), the idea here is to use feedback from HN to shape where we go from here, are there any features that you'd specifically like to see? is this something that appeals to you? the more feedback the better.

"Lean" is being used to justify increasing amounts of inanity. Please consider how you might be using up public goodwill to look at new startups by wasting people's time with nothing.

"The internet" is being used to justify everyone getting everything they want for free.. Please consider how you might be using up entrepreneurial goodwill to make your life easier in many different ways without ever giving back and wasting the entrepreneurs time for no return.

Lean principles are there to make sense of an idea before too much time is actually wasted developing it. I would say that getting a hundred people to spend 60 seconds reading a landing page and then signaling their intent with a quick click is much less wasteful than months of development on an idea that may not have any real market. Going onto the street with a clipboard and survey doesn't really cut it todays world...

I was quite happy to help, as i was with the buffer lean landing page before.. i would hope that if i wanted to do the same type of thing to validate an idea, that i could count on the tech community to help...

Can I use tray.io to send email messages into a CRM? :O

Yep - that's a great example of how Tray would be used. Is there a particular CRM / Service you'd like to see integrated? You would be able to forward the whole email or specific parts of an email (ie attachments) as the rule dictates.

You'd probably want to use a service like Postmark[1] or Mailgun[2] or Mailnuggets[3] for that as they already exist and are built for that sort of thing. They can handle attachments and the like too. They're simple enough to use depending on what you want to do, although if you just want to use "if email is to support@domain.com forward to crm@otherdomain.com" you could use gmail filters on their own.

[1] http://postmarkapp.com/inbound [2] http://mailgun.com [3] http://mailnuggets.com

Your website does not display properly in IE 9.

thanks for the heads up!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com