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Comment by alooPotato | Hacker News Reader

We (Streak, YCS11) have been using this API for a few days to build our email snoozing feature (https://www.streak.com/email-snooze-in-gmail).

The API is really nice to use and makes interacting with Gmail way easier relative to IMAP. I'm surprised they don't recommend using this API to build full email clients. I fully expected that to be one of the core use cases.

The reason its hard (currently) to build a mail client using the API is that call to list the threads in your inbox or any other label doesn't actually return the messages in those threads. So its hard to show the people that are on the thread as well as some of the timestamp. If they added some more summary data to the thread object, I could see this becoming feasible.

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If anyone wants to snooze email without auth'ing your Gmail account, here's one I built in 2008 that's still going strong.

http://hitmelater.com/

It costs $30/yr for the high-end service but send me a note and I'll give you a link to signup for free.

interesting

And a competitor to you would be Follow Up Then which does what you do, I think. (http://fut.io/) I've used it for a very long time, but just switched to the snooze button in Streak. It's slick.

There is also our product, FollowUp.cc (https://followup.cc). We've been around for a little over 7 years!

One of the key differences between your solution (and fut.io, followup.cc) and our snooze is that we also do the conditional "but don't bring this back if there's a reply on this thread". Along with being able to "snooze" an email you're sending out with the conditional. This brings us much more in line with Boomerang's main functionality.

Plus our snoozing functionality is 100% free, no matter how many you schedule, or how long it's for :)

Oh, and you can see/edit/manage your snoozed emails all from right within Gmail.

And we also have the "Awaiting Reply" view that doesn't require you actually DO anything, other than send out emails. We show you a custom list of the last 20 emails you've sent that don't yet have a reply.

edit: added more about what features we have

fyi: fut.io will send you an email asking if you want to cancel the followup if there's a reply on the thread. I think the follow up email has to be replied to, though.

Any chance your project is open source? I would do this to something like 2 emails a year, but I'm intrigued by how it works from the technical aspect. Is there a database, or just exim/postfix magic?

I couldn't image handling email without a service like this, so I've built one as my first out-of-Codecademy project. I'm kinda proud that it works!

Free to use: http://www.pfalke.com Open source: https://github.com/pfalke/returnx

Sorry I'm super dumb :( what does 'snoozing' your email mean?

Hide it for the desired time, and then show up again as unread.

and here I am thinking that it meant "send this email later"...

We have that too :)

Seriously, I'm not trolling - why would you want to snooze an email (hide it from inbox and have it come back later - I had to go look it up)?

Apart from that I like the API idea - I have been beta testing my own personal document scanner - I email myself photos of bills and receipts and file them under the subject line (ie file-as bills.electricity) - it beats the hell out of a document scanner I never used.

Anyway I was going to link it to Evernote but I just don't use Evernote enough to justify it

> Seriously, I'm not trolling - why would you want to snooze an email (hide it from inbox and have it come back later - I had to go look it up)?

Example that happened to me yesterday: a colleague asks me for a piece of information that I know I can find in a book at home, but I'm at work. I snooze the email so that it doesn't fall at the bottom of my inbox, and so that it gets redelivered when I'm home and can access the book.

Hypothetically, wouldn't really aggressive archiving accomplish the same task?

Have a 0-email inbox, and if you get something that you can't address immediately (but you can take care of later in the day), then you leave it in the inbox. In the meantime, anything you can act on in some way gets acted upon and then archived. By the end of the day you would ideally have just that email in your inbox (and even in a realistic world you might have a few tasks lingering in your inbox, but few enough that you can glance and see that "task" still there). Check your email at the end of the day and act on the things you needed to postpone for whatever reason (as well as pruning emails loitering in the inbox).

This requires, as previously said, really aggressive archiving, but since there's no difference between inbox and all-mail as far as I know (unless you use it as a search operator e.g. "from:friend@university.edu label:inbox"), it wouldn't be that big a cost (except that you would have to remember to archive or go through later and archive stuff).

I had been doing this somewhat organically for a while - tagging emails that didn't get filtered automatically and archiving them when there was nothing more for me to do with them - but when I disabled all of my filters (a misguided experiment I don't recommend anyone attempt) I stopped.

Yeah, I do hardcore archiving and practice inbox 0 as much as possible, and it does alleviate that need. But it's still nice to have the email be at the top just when I get home.

I'm awful at remembering to do anything. When doing inbox zero, I find it really useful to be able to postpone emails so I get a push notification on my phone when they come back into my inbox. That way I know if there is anything in my inbox, I should look at it pretty soon to decide how to process it (deal with it or postpone it)

Agressive archiving and postponing emails aren't mutually exclusive. They complement each other really well.

[edit] It also reduces stress. Some things can be dealt with until the evening, or tomorrow, or the weekend. It's really nice not having to pick though a middle of things that need to be done later and now and be constantly reminded that there's all these things to do. Of course, you can tag them or put them in folders, but it's nice when those tags/folders then let you know they're due.

Yes, that is the traditional inbox zero method. Snoozing is just a tweak to make it easier to get back to zero at the end of each day.

In that case, I'm using Google now on my phone and saying "remind me to look up XYZ at home". And then I get a popup reminder when home.

I've been trying to just keep my inbox clean, with varying degrees of success. I could see how snoozing would be useful too.

> why would you want to snooze an email?

I use my Gmail inbox as sort of a todo list. If a conversation is in my Inbox, it needs attention from me - I need to do some work related to it, reply to it, forward it, etc. Once I'm done with an email thread, I immediately archive it.

If you use this workflow (many do), snoozing an email is useful. I use it primarily for threads where I'm not able to reply and provide information immediately (so removing it from my inbox until I can reduces distraction), and for threads where I'd like to follow-up in a few days, if for example I don't get a reply.

Sounds like you should start using flags instead ("stars" in web-gmail?) Then your todo list should be easily accessible through a filtered list of flagged messages. Most IMAP clients offer this out of the box.

I have labels for organization but once something is marked as read or out of my priority inbox (where starred emails go) is has an extremely low priority and might as well not exist. If it's in my inbox and unread it gives me anxiety not to action it. A Snooze feature is a perfect middle ground.

Gmail also offers a nifty "Starred First" view which keeps the last 10 or so starred emails at the top

http://i.imgur.com/0Vokq4C.png

Or just use snoozing (I use mailbox) and this problem is solved. I could not go back to using a mail client that doesn't have this feature.

gmail lets you create tasks on emails. Any reason you don't use that instead?

How would you link it into Evernote?

I built a repository like Evernote where you can email and text your content for saving. Butternote.com

AFAIK it's related to the "inbox zero" concept. You want nothing in your inbox except things that need to be actioned, but if you can't action something yet, you might want to snooze it.

  > I'm surprised they don't recommend using this API to
  > build full email clients. I fully expected that to be
  > one of the core use cases.

I didn't see today's API announcement, but I'd be surprised if they wanted to encourage that. Similar to how Twitter doesn't want you to write full-fledged Twitter clients.

If we write full-fledged Gmail clients, won't they miss out on the ad revenue? Maybe not; maybe they're just glad to tie us to their service and data-mine our emails even if we're not using Google's web client.

Still, I'd be scared of basing a lot of work around this API, since they have a history of deprecating and discontinuing things in the past...

> "... won't they miss out on the ad revenue?"

There's already a setting they lets you turn off ads. In any case, revenue from those ads is probably incomparable to the data-mining which they can then use to show you ads elsewhere.

Is there any way to use this feature without all the other Streak stuff cluttering up the UI (among other things, the "box" icon on every message in list view, Pipelines on the left, big button on the top, six new buttons in compose view). The CRM stuff looks spiffy, and getting the snooze feature through you is good advertising in any case, but I don't currently have a use case for those features, so I can't use the extension if it's going to fill up the UI with them.

omg yes.

We're working on making all of our features togglable. Stay tuned.

I use a small google script to "snooze" my emails. I change them to a custom label which the script looks for. The script just runs once a day and sends me a summary of ones with this label if I haven't already replied to them.

If it's useful to anyone: http://pastebin.com/c4JvjNef

The Google Apps Developer blog had a post back in 2011 showing how to do this: http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/gmail-snoo...

Cool. Thanks. That's nicer than what I did!

Totally off topic: On that page, in the image next to "Compose and Snooze", did you mean to have "Invalid Date" in the yellow box?

Pic: https://www.streak.com/images/snooze/snoozeCompose.png

Just a heads up, your Youtube videos on the home page won't play in Chrome if you loaded the page over HTTPS (you get a blank pop-up and the "This page contains insecure content." message). Slick product you have!

Aleem, this is great to see. We at FollowUp.cc (https://followup.cc) have been doing snoozing for quite a while and have a Chrome extension that does this as well. We are getting close to rewriting our entire extension from the ground up, and this API is definitely going to make our lives easier. Side note, I'm a big fan of Streak =)

It will be interesting to see how and if Context.io (http://context.io) starts to use this API. We use Context, and it's a fantastic product.

How fine grained are the permissions? Can your snoozing app operate with a sufficiently restrictive set of permissions that you are prevented from reading my email?

Unfortunately to snooze an email we need to be able to read the message and reinsert it. That requires full read/write permission.

If we instead just replied to the thread, we could probably get away with just read permissions.

Is it possible to have full read/write permission but no communication with the outside world?

Presumably, this would involve denying the ability to send emails and denying various forms of network access.

The API that launched today is just a backend API, so by definition your email data is accessible to the application on their servers.

You may be confusing how Streak works, where we have a browser extension that runs inside your browser, but our backend is the one doing the snoozing.

Your email is the least creepy thing Streak has access to. There's also a feature that tells the user when an email they've sent has been read.

You mean "read receipts" which have been around for decades?

And can be bypassed in most standalone clients

About 6 months ago I helped out a woman with some computer issues. She is/was a bit paranoid, coming out of an abusive relationship.

I didn't think much of it, until I noticed access to her Gmail from Japan I seem to recall ( we are in Western Europe ).

Streak was installed into her account.

I have no idea what someone can do who has access to the Streak account. I just removed the permissions.

Feedback: your snoozing feature is confusing because it overlaps with your reminders. Should I use reminder or snooze?

This is a good point. Typiucally, reminders are useful for reminding your team about a box (a deal or customer...) that needs to be looked at. Snoozed emails are just for you and remind you about a particular email.

There is clearly some overlap in use case and we're working on making that better but wanted to get out Snoozing as soon as possible.

Is your app similar to Boomerang? If so I will check it out more

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