Show HN: I built a tool to stop cold email spam (Unspam.io) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a tool to stop cold email spam (Unspam.io)

unspam.io

9 pointslouwhopley7 comments

Hi HN! I'm Louw, founder of the enterprise insurtech scale-up Root[0]. Over the last 8 years, my inbox has been flooded with unsolicited emails, especially since early 2023. Recruitment services, outsourced software development agencies, and a crazy amount of lead generation services (thanks, Apollo!) drowned my inbox.

To solve this, I created Unspam. Initially, it was a simple tool for myself and fellow founders to reduce noise. And it worked — about 10% of my emails were swiftly and accurately categorized as unsolicited messages.

Given its success, I've decided to package and share Unspam with the broader community, evolving it into Unspam.io.

How it works: 1. Hook up your Gmail 2. Unspam monitors received mail in the background 3. Unsolicited emails are labeled and archived

Please try it out and let me know your feedback. What would you improve? https://unspam.io

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[0] https://rootplatform.com [1] PS: I value privacy intensely. Unspam doesn’t record, store, or train on your emails. No need to.

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It is certainly a problem but you said you value privacy, so I think it’s a hard sell for people to give access of their email (which mostly have sensitive information) to a SaaS product that has just started.

Btw, there is an open source app doing the same called inbox zero.

+1. This is a complete no-go. Therefore, I haven't tested your flow.

But if you value privacy, please make it clear for people that they give you access to their emails, with a relatively big warning. Even if you're honest and say you won't do anything with them, you could still be hacked.

While this is a problem to be solved, I feel like MS and Google and just tweak their spam algos and your tool would no longer be needed.

That tweak would make many people happy.

How is this measurably different from running SpamAssassin against my local mail queue the same way I did it 20-some years ago? Other than 1) it requires Gmail which any privacy-conscious user won't use, and 2) "AI"

The merits of this service aside, the cynical takes on HN can be exhausting.

“How is pooping in a toilet measurably different from using a bucket - the same way people did 100 years ago?“

Good questions.

Firstly, this is specifically designed for business users (founders, ceo's) that are already using Google Workspace for email. Using SpamAssassin (afaik) is not possible in that environment.

On the "AI" topic, it's not used because AI is a cool thing. It's used because of the wide permutations these cold emails come in. Lead gen people, SDR folks, and tools like Apollo makes it trivial for outbound sales peeps to send bulk personalised mails. The emails that Unspam focus on are the ones that already make it through Google's "black box" spam filter (and boy, does Google filter out a lot of spam already! like 99% of all mail that hit my inbox).

I can't compare against SpamAssassin, but from using Unspam for the last 8 months, I received 11,951 emails of which 663 we're caught as spam (after Google's spam filter let them through).

Anyhow, the primary goal of this is to make it super easy for busy people like founders and CEOs (who are often non-technical) to simply enable the filter on their inbox and continue with work. :)

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