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Comment by daviding | Hacker News Reader

Nicely done. Feedback:

- Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that.

- A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font.

- You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names).

- I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?

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Thanks for your feedback!

"Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that."

We haven't worked out a formal privacy policy ... but of course, user privacy is our top priority! We won't use user emails for anything else. In fact, from the post page, you can't find your email address.

"A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font."

We are still improving on the UI ... We would appreciate if you tell us your preferred font :)

"You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names)"

We also take care of unsubscribe part if the unsubscribe url contains your email address.

"I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?"

Definitely there are many possibilities to explore from what we have right now. We'd like to hear users comments / critiques / suggestions first.

Just to clarify what I meant by the 'unsubscribe' part, many newsletters (like your Costco example from the OP) contain an unsubscribe link without an email but with a unique id in the href. When clicking this you often get to a page that then lets you unsubscribe and sometimes also see who the address was subscribed too, which defeats the purpose. I'm not sure what would be the ideal solution, but you could hit it with a hammer and remove all hrefs from the content in the email DOM, or perhaps parse explicitly for unsubscribe links (harder, as they vary, a bit of NLP etc). Alternatively, just consider the page as 'not for hostiles', in that the user should only share with people who wouldn't hunt for mischief in the first place.

For next steps and parsing, it really depends on if you want to store a user graph your end, i.e. do you want to also initiate the 'share' and know who is looking at the link? If you do then the features go in one direction (collaboration, conversations, actionable stuff) but if you don't want that then it's sort of a different animal (formatting, i.e. galleries, content suggestions and the like).

For a font, Helvetica Neue or anything in that family is all the rage ;)

Thank for your insightful feedback! It's really really helpful! We'll think through it :)

Please consider keeping the default serif font. It lends an air of humble authenticity to the service, giving the impression that it's hosted by some no-BS people who want an alternative to the glossy and boring options for social media.

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