Show HN: Reach more people with a Share-to-Gmail-contacts button | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Reach more people with a Share-to-Gmail-contacts button

gmailsharebutton.com

14 pointsishener26 comments

This is one of the scariest buttons I've ever seen: When would I ever want to email everybody in my Gmail contacts list? everybody??

Is it really so different from sharing something on facebook?

From my experience regular users sometimes prefer sharing with everyone instead of taking the time to select specific contacts. They don't really care, it's just email...

I've opted-in to be friends with someone on Facebook. I've opted-in to follow someone on Twitter. I have not opted-in to be in someone's contact list on Gmail. That's the big difference.

But you gave the person your email address. He wants to send you an email. I just help him fulfill his wish...

No I didn't. There's nothing stopping someone from finding my email address and sticking it in their contact list. How do you think spammers get email addresses in the first place? People give them their email addresses?

I concur 100% with CanSpice.

I saw the email from a contact, clicked through and saw that your app only asks for "view contacts" so I though I'd be able to choose to whom I'd send an email or at least have some kind of confirmation before all of a sudden "BAM" you send thousands of emails to everyone I've emailed in the past 5 years.

That's really bad. You have to improve the UX/UI so that there's a bit of granularity and more transparency otherwise, you're going to lose your Google API access... or simply disappear as everyone marks your emails as spam.

I hear what you are saying. I'll think about adding another confirmation screen after the authorization.

I think this is a minimum. Optimally you'd have a UI which allows you to choose with whom to share... otherwise it's simply not pertinent for so many people and thus simply spam.

Even if I did want to share something with all my contacts on Gmail, the other challenge is that Gmail considers EVERYONE you have ever emailed a "contact". That's hundreds and hundreds of people, old mailing lists, etc. etc. that are on there. It's not a "contact list", it's a list of everyone I have ever contacted.

Anything sent to more than around 25 contacts is marked as spam in gmail, is there a way to get around that?

Sure -- just move to a small, isolated foreign country and set up an email distribution system that relies on compromised windows machines (i.e. bots) instead of your Gmail account.

In other words, these limits are in place for a reason. If the Gmail ecosystem didn't stop you from sending 25 simultaneous emails, you might lose all your friends instead.

This is nice and all, but I really hope nobody who has me in their contacts ever clicks that button.

You need to think about it from the perspective of site-owners, not of email recipients ;-)

You (and I'm assuming you're the person who came up with this) need to think about it from the perspective of email recipients, because they're the ones who are going to be directly affected by this button.

You don't say at all how this works. Do you scrape the email addresses? What does the email look like? Does it have any sort of opt-out mechanism?

How do emails sent by this conform to Canada's anti-spam legislation, or any other country's anti-spam legislation?

There's no scraping going on. I'm using Google's Contacts API, with authorization from the user who clicks the button.

Currently the email is plain-text, but in the future paying customers can customize the email sent

You can opt-out simply by filtering out emails sent from your past contacts, who you do not wish to receive emails from.

So my mom clicks this button on a website. I'm supposed to block all of her emails because she did so and I don't want to get your emails again?

I think you really need to think this through again, because there are fundamental problems that you're not getting. Emails sent this way will be considered as spam, and you'll piss off people receiving the emails, and they'll be pissed off at the person who clicked the button, and then that person will get pissed off at you, which I don't think you want.

This is not legal in some countries.

While your customers are the ones breaking the law you might find your network access increasingly restricted.

I wish there was a better version of NANAE still around.

I don't know if it's illegal. I do know that it's perfectly moral. I mean, it's just email... It's not like I'm tricking people into giving me money...

I think responses in this thread are somewhat lacking a sense of humor

If it's a joke site then well done, v funny.

But if it is a joke site it's attempting to parody bad marketers and they are viciously stupid and thus your parody is indistinguishable from stuff they actually do.

Project Gutenberg started when Michael Hart tried to email copies of the American Declaration of Independence to everyone on his local network; they were not amused and so he set up a website instead.

The first commercial email spam was probably the DEC spam to all Arpanet. http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

If you do not have a confirmed, opt-in, agreement with people you're sending bulk email to you need to be very careful or you risk losing internet connectivity. You're not warning your customers about that.

You're also violating parts of Google's tos. Lucky for you Google refuse to take any form of contact from the outside world so your service will survive until someone there notices it.

> I don't know if it's illegal. I do know that it's perfectly moral.

In the U.S., unless you have a business relationship with the recipients, it's both illegal and immoral. It violates the U.S. federal Can-Spam Act.

> I think responses in this thread are somewhat lacking a sense of humor

I want to see the smile on your face when you're arrested for providing an easy way to violate the law en masse.

I would love to hear your feedback.

Would you consider putting this on your site? If not, why?

You might want to check your spelling in your signup.

You put 'you' instead of 'your'.

you're right, thank you!

sooo... this is just a way for you to collect email addresses and annoy people, right?

I most certainly do not intend to collect email addresses!

Regarding annoying people, however,...

however what?

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