Tray.io - powerful email assistant
tray.io
tray.io
I was recently asking people for a way to translate emails into SMSs, so I could route my system alerts (from various places) to a single email and ensure I always get by SMS. It's a surprisingly hard problem right now, which Tray looks like it would solve elegantly if they get SMS right.
1) set up a Zapier mailbox as the trigger, send direct or forward to.
2) set up an SMS (or Gtalk or whatever) action.
But tray.io looks like it can handle far more advanced rules (or at least those somewhat comparable to procmail, and without having to do a bunch of manual scripting!), but in a more user-friendly, graphical way. And if it can automatically generate machine-learned rule suggestions based on user behavior, that would be even more fantastic.
The only major downside is that you have to be willing to let a third-party have access to your e-mail (and I know that when I've written server-side procmail scripts that have misbehaved, I've managed to unintentionally lose e-mail at least once or twice in my lifetime; of course, I didn't know that I had even lost the mail, since the server silently discarded it due to my malformed rules).
[0] http://www.procmail.org/ [1] http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve
I fear I'll never benefit from apps like this as my email account is the skeleton key to my online identity. I'm not sure I could trust any other human being with the password.
Work is being done on supporting other email providers, which will obviously require storing the users credentials in a secure way & there is also a white label/internally hosted version in the works for the enterprise that mmahemoff mentioned..
Security for email is definitely our biggest issue so far, but we want to make sure we have it nailed before we go public...
They provide similar filters and suggest filters from your communication behavior. E.g., you consistently respond to Peter Norvig quickly, perhaps you want an alert.
No, you're not.
When I'm choosing businesses to work with, one of the first things I consider is longevity. Of course there's always a possibility that another business will close down after you start working with them, but there's not much point building a relationship with a business if you actively expect that to happen in the near future.
I think this is something that a certain part of the start-up culture doesn't really take into account yet. The current popularity of acqui-hires and the obvious goal of some founders/investors to just get the company sold at the earliest possible opportunity make me very wary of dealing with small, young companies that have taken a lot of investment or were started by "serial entrepreneurs".
[1] http://fluentmail.tumblr.com/post/28767857337/fluent-is-clos...
It's not something I'd try to launch otherwise. I'd be more about a B2B service which aims to improve issue tracking, response times, and accountability. If that does well, go on to work on knowledge retention and retrieval, which is pretty much a giant black hole you can play in forever.
If this allowed anonymous analytics in order to discover and suggest useful rules, either at the personal level or in aggregate over all users, that would be awesome. Likewise if you can publish, clone and fork useful rules then modify them for one's account. The less a user has to come up with their own rules, the better.
And there are things that IFTTT doesn't do for e-mail that this might do. And there are API's that IFTTT doesn't support (the big one for me is springpad).
As for time sensitive, this could potentially learn what you respond to immediately upon viewing, and what you wait on or don't view, (and even analyze that as a function of day, time, sender, etc.) If it had permissions to analyze e-mail texts and had enough users, it could use machine learning to learn what phrases were likely to prompt immediate action, IE "By tomorrow morning" vs. "By Tuesday morning" on a Wednesday.
As for non Oauth accounts, A browser plugin that stored your credentials locally could still be possible. I seem to recall reading about somebody working on a clever way to do this involving passing session information using a proxy and encryption or something like that, but my memory isn't great.
All in all, I wish them luck.
The only problem are time-sensitive emails. For those I still need to periodically check my inbox to see if something urgent's come up.
If there's a way to tell Tray "If time-sensitive email, send me a tweet", that would be superbly magnificent. The landing page doesn't seem to indicate this.
The idea would be that you could setup custom rules based on the people who email you, or other web services you use, for example if a hot lead in sales force emailed you while your in a meeting, then forward it via SMS.
Being able to pickout a "time sensistive" email would really depend on what you consider time sensitive, but im sure we could provide something that would help.. email dom at tray.io and we can talk more about how tray could help fix your issue..?
There's just so much to it that it seems like something only a human could do. That said, the guy from tray.io who replied with a potential solution seems to be on the right track. Its not a perfect solution but it's good enough and sometimes good enough is all you can do.
4th party. Most of their target audience is probably on GMail and has no privacy concerns to begin with.
Or you could use, you know, a native client. It may increasingly become a foreign concept to the "facebook generation" but your computer is still fully capable of running a mail client on its own.
Of course you don't get to sell SaaS-subscriptions when you implement tray.io as a procmail GUI...
The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository
http://www.procmail.org http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ http://www.mutt.org/
The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI.
Yes, that actually bothers me a lot. Can you imagine the crazy effort that I go through every time I update my mail-client?
It takes the better part of 5 minutes every time (I'm not exaggerating here) and last year I had to do it twice!
How to install, use, and maintain linux. How to install, use, and maintain their own mail server and spam filters. How PGP works. How to setup and use thunderbird+enigimail or mutt.
Compared to visiting a URI, would doing so be more technically demanding or less technically demanding for users who have not specialized in computing? Is the proportion of society which inevitably chooses not to specialize in a computing inherently more deserving or inherently less deserving of the benefits of encryption and privacy?
I think the gap in our perspective is most likely attributable to A) how widespread we wish to see encryption used by the general public in the future, or B) our expectations of the of the technical stamina of the general public when confronted with unfamiliar tasks, rather than generational effects.
The conversation was about a product aimed squarely at GMail "Power-Users" who willfully run all their e-mail through one or more third partys.
And besides, you don't need to linux to run a mail program.
When you sign up for an account on most sites it's implied that you're giving up some bit of privacy for the convenience of having someone else handle your data. The alternative is building and maintaining your own system which isn't always realistic and the vast majority of people on earth cant do it.
I get that privacy is important to a lot of people and that the fact that sometimes protecting your privacy means making things difficult for yourself but I don't know if there's any way around it (actually, I don't believe there is). For example, some people Who are very concerned with privacy refuse to use Facebook and because of this they are missing out on connecting with friends, colleagues, and even potential customers because those people rely on Facebook so heavily to communicate. I've seen the people who are left out in the cold because of this then become even more vocal about privacy issues (not saying you're one of them, just in general) but in the end we all still have a choice.
Choosing to protect your privacy these days means potentially sacrificing a lot more in its place. Some people argue that this fact proves that we don't have a choice but I disagree. We may not like the consequences but the choice still exists.
Personally I'm all about privacy but not to the point of blocking cookies or other tracking on websites or avoiding services because they can potentially see my data. I think at a certain point you either have to trust that nothing is likely to go wrong by simply using a service or just not use it. I mean, there's always the risk that your personal information may fall into the wrong hands but that's life - its risk. You just have to be smart and/or realistic about it. I'll accept the risk I take storing my payment information with Amazon and I'll accept the risk of having some information willingly stored in Google's services and even be tracked by Analytics. I'll be more cautious with the risk of letting a new service like tray.io potentially reading my emails.
I don't think there's a way to offer a service like this without giving up some privacy. Do you know of a way to alleviate privacy concerns while still offering the kinds of services that, as you rightly point out, erode our privacy? The person who comes up with that could definitely profit!
Please believe me when I say I get your concern. I'm just kind of a weirdo around here. I don't hold many strong positions one way or the other on most issues. I tend to be in the center on most things. I'm a very moderate HNer which I feel is unusual but I'm definitely glad there are people like you who lean more toward either end of the spectrum instead of being in the middle on a given issue. It may turn out that my nonchalant attitude towards privacy will bite people like me one day and people like you will be there to change things (and say "I told you so" :)).
If you have 100 common contacts (as opposed to the other 900 who email once and a while) and I need, say, a rule or two for each to cover the basics... and a rule or two to cover groups of people (because one-to-one emails are the exception in business not the rule)... isn't that hundreds and hundreds of rules?
Not having seen the alpha, that feels like an insurmountable first threshold, UX-wise.
Also, just out of curiosity, other than general ease-of-use (which seems much nicer in your 3 examples), how is this better than typical filters (which I don't use)?
Email rules that are setup within the client or service restrict filtering to contact, folder, content (in some cases). We can react to data that's outside of your inbox, anything from your relationship to the contact based on another web service, to accessing, storing, and sharing with services you use regularly. Beyond this triggers such as time, email load (driven from analytics), location can all come into play. We are really just getting started with the possibilities, a way to interact with custom web apps would be great for developers/companies that use bespoke tools.
The ease of this tool is inversely related to the need for it. i.e. — the more complex/high volume your inbox, the more you suffer while trying to set it up.
Maybe it would be worth implementing some "starter rules" or a "wizard" that allows the first-timer to leverage many basic rules at once, immediately.
It's the Pinterest approach, if you will. :) "Pick 5 things you like" and then they auto-follow 50 people based on your choices. Voilá! Good first experience.
Remember that features ≠ power ≠ satisfaction.
I apologize for the unsolicited suggestions; you hit my area of interest right in the middle. ;) Good luck with everything and congrats on getting to the alpha in the first place!
Edit: Oh and great job on the app! I think this is an awesome idea and if some of the privacy and longevity concerns were addressed, I would use it all the time!
Check it out! During the interview Dom talks about startingup, their pivot and shares advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Job lads!
Tray is awesome. Met these guys in London on their demo through our accelerator exchange program.
If they add post-read-filtering of the inbox it would handle some sorting after the work is finished as well. For example, filter all mail from X flagged with label done to that customers folder.
Integrating to tightly with gmail would perhaps make it harder to support other imap platforms, since gmail can do more in some areas.
Good luck with your project!