Show HN: Signal – Edit emails in your Gmail inbox

Why does it need to access my data on all websites? Shouldn't it only need access to mail.google.com?

Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.

This is a fantastic concept, but I will never use it because I don't use Chrome and I don't like the idea of my inbox being different on each device I use.

I'll just wait for Google to either ripoff the idea or (hopefully) acquihire the company and integrate it into Gmail itself.

Really the idea that the message preview is the FIRST two lines is comically absurd, especially for a company like Google. It's actually amazing to me nobody has done this yet.

As an initial concept it's interesting but not very useful for most people in it's current state as it ultimately requires me to spend more time in my inbox. I think the real potential is in your "Coming Soon" feature, where it will hopefully be able to automatically figure out the best subject lines for me and save me time in the long run. Ultimately, it'd be great if it could decipher whether or not the email can be answered with a simple answer (yes/no, a time/date, etc), and provide the buttons to respond to it without ever actually opening up the email itself.

As far as the site itself goes - it has a clean, simple to understand interface lacks anything sexy to sell the idea. The animation is a great idea, but just seems dry and lacks context. Looking at the "Using Signal" page (https://trysignal.com/using-signal/), I'd say use a screenshot similar to the one there (albeit with the full inbox visible), and show an animation of the email being edited in real time rather than the side by side comparison. That would be a much clearer demonstration and immediately provide the context as to what's happening. In all reality you could just integrate the "Using Signal" page into the main index for the moment as it doesn't have enough information to really constitute a secondary page.

Classy address in the MailChimp email, but I'm not sure this is CAN-SPAM compliant:

  Signal
  Starbucks
  San Francisco, CA 94100

What is this actually doing? I.e. are the emails being edited on the server or is the extension storing a set of edits and applying them when you view the edited emails in Gmail in Chrome? Are the original emails still accessible? How?

There is a HUGE branding problem here.

A few weeks ago, Hubspot launched their gmail add-on product called Signals.

Now this company has launched their gmail add-on product called Signal.

The products are way too similar to avoid user confusion.

See http://www.getsignals.com/ vs https://trysignal.com/

I like the idea of re-naming these as a form of mini-notes.

But now that Gmail is getting into providing context for emails (such as flight check-ins), I'd like it if the auto-generated emails could also learn based on summaries I provide. Kind of like a filter rule based on what I've done in the past to re-name the email to what I'm looking for.

I'll share an even better approach that works across all devices, allows better todo management and allows you to preserve the original email context.

The first thing you need to know is that an email sent to username+anything@gmail.com is the same as sending it to username@gmail.com. Knowing that you can send all your notes to username+todo@gmail.com and then create a filter to attach a Yellow "TODO" label for any such emails received. You can send yourself reminders from anywhere. You may want to add your "todo" in your address book for convenience.

You can also reply to any email that needs attention and change the recipient to username+todo@gmail.com. If you add a short summary in the first line of the body, it will show in your inbox preview. That email will sit in your inbox vying for your attention and when you open it, you can always refer to the original thread. It's also possible to expand this idea further. For example, you can reply to an existing todo email and add more details. You can also keep a draft email within the same thread where you have rough notes. I have drafts that are a year old attached to todo items. You can mark items complete fairly easily as well. You should have GMail keyboard shortcuts enabled if you don't already.

On a related note, you can also sync your iPhone notes to keep them on GMail. That works out nicely as you always have them backed up online and you can have read-only access to them from anywhere through your GMail account.

I haven't needed anything more for my todo management.

I love the idea, but I'm guessing that this extension stores your edits on the local machine you're using at the time?

I jump from computer to computer and something like this would only really be helpful for me if my edits followed me around. Possible?

Find a way to give back the old compose message box, charge $1 to buy the feature and you'll be a millionaire in a week.

I do this with Thunderbird (IMAP access to gmail) and the Header Tools Lite plugin. Works for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-to...

This is the one thing that has kept me from completely switching to Gmail. However, since these edits are not actually written back to the email, but stored locally (even synced with Signal on other machines), it does no good since the Gmail app on my Android phone and tablet can't see the changes. BE VERY CLEAR you're just editing and storing locally. The original Gmail message unchanged. I combined two emails, deleted one of them, and checked it in the Gmail app. All I see is the original message, but other other is deleted. This will just confuse most people. Unless this can change the message on Gmail, it is useless to me.

Offtopic: the feature I lack is to permanently add some info (like tags) so that email is searchable by some keywords, but I guess that's harder to make (and should be done on gmail side).

Great application!

One bug I noticed is that when I mark a message as unread, the subject line / summary text goes back to what it used to be.

Maybe you guys could have an empty repo on GitHub to keep track of bugs?

Strange. When I open gmail, I have to give permission. I do that, dismiss the dialog, the page refreshes, and I get the same dialog. Over and over again, I think I've given the app my permission like 10 times. And the buttons aren't appearing in my gmail.

What am I doing wrong?

Is the original email accessible somewhere after I create my edited version?

This interferes with my GMail keyboard shortcuts (presumably because editing mode is on by default when I open an email). There should be some kind of option to make editing mode off by default.

Or am I missing something?

It expands the first conversation for an email conversation. This change in default settings (Gmail by default expands the latest message) is very painful! I un-installed it after 1 hour of usage...

Lack of priority inbox support is a deal killer for me.

Is usage of Prio Inbox not common?

Now you have two problems.

If you guys are storing this data in Firebase, then the next logical step is a native mobile app, likely iOS. What's the timeframe for such?

This is a good start. I am hesistant to share my Gmail info with any app.

on the other hand Gmail itself (as in the client) is clearly reading my mail

I may have missed this, but do you offer any sort of revision control? Don't want to accidentally delete something important.

Off Topic: How do you guys make that awesome gif video on the homepage without making the file size too large?

Messes with keyboard shortcut workflow :(

I like this a lot but moving back from message to inbox now takes an extra second with the extension enabled.

Seems to open emails in "editing" mode by default. I filed an issue on Github.

Unrelated - pretty surreal to see my relatively small hometown used in an example.

It's not immediately clear to me what problem this is solving.

This is not seamless. I don't need to try it to find that out, I just have seen this type of extension enough times to know that it isn't seamless, especially in beta form.

Cool concept, lets see where it'll go!

is there anyone to set the default mode to edit as opposed to have it default to editing?

Yeah, just what I need. More American corporations with access to my data ......

awesome! def like what i see so far!