I worked with Spatch to make Switchboard, and will be around to answer any questions.
Our motivation in building and continuing to build Switchboard is to make it easier for developers to process emails. Looking forward to more ideas!
Our motivation in building and continuing to build Switchboard is to make it easier for developers to process emails. Looking forward to more ideas!
Since I sent my first email in the 80's, I've wanted to build business-logic systems with mail-based interfaces - things like, have an address such as "calendar@mydomain.com" which can be cc'ed on emails which might contain future scheduling events, and have the calendar@ client automatically work out the details of reminding everyone of the date-target that was set .. Seems to me that Switchboard would be the ideal platform upon which to develop such services .. among other things too. See any gotcha's?
Its always amazed me that automated email is not used more and more for basic business processes - sure, we have mailing lists and autoresponders and all sorts of things like that, but the fact that most language/tech stacks don't really treat email as the human-maintained message queue, with first class priorities, seems a little lacking .. I guess Switchboard is an attempt to make up for that. Anyway, thanks again - I'll certainly be devoting some research time to this tool, and I hope I can build something useful on top of it ..
One note: Switchboard is especially useful relative to a bare IMAP connection when you're monitoring many accounts. This is because it provides a lot of the boilerplate around restarting failed connections and issuing IMAP commands while an IMAP connection has an active IDLE continuation.
I agree that there's tons of room for more automation around emails. I think the lack of automation is due to not having high-level tools, which is where Switchboard comes in, and that emails are typically natural language. I'm personally excited to see Switchboard get used for email classification -- imagine if your business-logic could include the email "class", e.g. "sent by a human", or "marketing", ... etc. A bit like Gmail's categories, but open and accessible to developers.
I'll play with it .. hope you won't mind if I contact you in a week or so in case I have questions or maybe even to give you feedback/demo of what I've come up with in the meantime..