Show HN: Easily publish an email conversation to the web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Easily publish an email conversation to the web

beta.thread.is

52 pointstrevoro33 comments

Looks nice! But instead of authorizing you access to my gmail account, I'd rather just forward you a thread. You could parse the incoming mail, and reply me the link.

Yup we've got that working too - but we wanted to make the email cleaning algorithm better prior to launching that feature.

Stay tuned ;)

It would be nice to see what the published thread looks like. Could you have a link to a sample thread on your homepage?

Sure thing. We'll put one up on the website. In the meantime here is a link:

https://beta.thread.is/t/c487c28d-285c-4349-8e0f-396699df3e9...

How many emails in a thread can this handle? A friend was JUST asking me of a way to export a 55,000 email long email thread. Will he break this if he uses it?

Just out of curiosity, how did the email chain become that long? I've had a few that went into the hunderds but 55,000 is a lot.

As my friend tells it, he and his friends have used that single thread as a way to keep in touch for the last 5+ years.

55K emails in a thread? WTF? =)

For all of the discussion about how to create distributed social networks I'm surprised there aren't more things built on top of email. This is nice. There's a lot of potential here.

I know you'd miss the syncing, but why not let me just cc something@thread.is instead of having to gain access to my google account? It would be usable to people on exchange as well that way...

We had thought about doing it this way but it won't help capturing the responses from the people we email. This is how highrise works and it has that pain.

If you are using Google Apps for your domain (at least the Business version -- maybe the free one too), you can setup a private Google group and CC it to store such information and make it accessible and searchable to others using your Google App domain.

Of course, you can also use Google Groups for a private mailing list, but here you can store a thread (which, like gmail, is nicely collapsed) without having to synchronize everyone joining your group. Handy for document support requests via email.

Ah man, I've been working on a side project that does just this for the last couple weeks. Was almost ready to show it off. Good on ya, guys.

Launch it. Yours could be better for all we know.

Yep, I'm still going to. There's some difference between our ideas and I think they're both valuable for different segments. I should have a show HN within a week.

Why not collaborate?

Cool! I'd love to hear about what you were working on. trevoro [at] coherence.io

Yeah, I'll definitely get in touch soon. Cheers!

I've also been working on something that's very similar for the last few months. I'd love to chat with you also. My email is in my profile.

First of all the UI looks clean and impressive. It'll be great if you could also show who all were on that email thread and may be social links of people involved.

On a side note, it'll be great if you could show me email conversation happening in mailing lists. It'll be a relief from those boring and complicated interfaces. for eg such email thread can be represented in this format http://librelist.com/browser//easymode/2011/10/9/using-djang...

What happens if someone replies to an email that's out of context.

Alternatively, what happens if I have a group thread and someone replies directly to me rather than "reply all".

Looks super clean but I'm just wondering about some unintended consequences that might come up if I use it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "out of context" but I will <asssume> you mean "an email that has nothing to do with the original conversation"

This particular version relies on Google's conversation grouping implementation to extract the appropriate emails. If someone replies out of context, that would be up to a human to move into a new Thread. We had some thoughts like "fork from here" or "create a new conversation".

Right now your email conversations are not automatically sync'd but when they are, any reply to your email conversation (what Gmail interprets as such) would be appended to the page.

Unintended Consequences? Isn't that the whole idea? ;)

Now - I could definately see this behind a password as a means of managing/storing/retaining email with attachments for a business.

Something with a little intelligence which referenced meetings & other emails would be a sick corporate knowledge base.

Any plans on adding support for Outlook conversations? I have had great technical conversations via Outlook that I would have loved to share with the team, but ended up having to forward the convo.

Twist: There might be copyright issues, absent (express) consent of both parties.

But i could still see this being interesting in some contexts.

We've definitely thought about that.

Personally I find it quite interesting that sharing a link with someone has different psychological perceptions than forwarding an email. There is implied trust with an email conversation - but the reality is you never know who is being BCC'd.

Good point. Even without BCC, you have no control over who gets added to a conversation later on. I can think of at least a few instances where a client casually CC'd me on what began as an internal conversation, often with sensitive information earlier on in the thread.

Wow. I was just wondering if something like this existed not an hour ago. Looks pretty cool, excited to try it out.

I just tried this out.

Looks good, though I have a comment. How come I don't see the date and time per email on the thread?

How do I delete a thread?

You'll have that by the end of the day. (Promise!)

Delete has been added. The creator of a thread will see a bin icon that will delete the conversation.

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