Comment by vu0tran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vu0tran | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys, Vu, the founder here.

I'm a developer and my email habits are absolutely horrible. Whenever I put in long hours of coding, I feel like the time it takes to context switch between development and doing email is way too high.

Because of this, I'm notorious for missing emails, flights even or just not responding to emails as it gets lost in my inbox forever.

I essentially started making this email app for myself and it's finally working quite well. There have been times where I've completely forgotten about a meeting and it's reminded me to show up on time. The sorting uses a lot of NLP magic and I find it to be pretty accurate too for me to take back control of my inbox. I just want to see how far I can run with it and already working on trying to suggest replies to emails.

There are a lot of email apps on the market and I think their concept is "how do we incorporate better design and work flow to solve the email problem"? My notion is rather, "how do we use technology to solve the email problem?"

Other than that, I'm also really excited with the privacy route I decided to take. The downside is that deploying across multiple platforms will be more challenging without a central server side component, but if the plus is that if one chooses the option of going "private" (essentially this turns off server side push notifications) there won't be any communication with my server at all.

It's been a real struggle these past few months so I'm super excited!!

I wanted to thank you for doing the processing on-device.

Too many mail clients are trying to sync you mail up to their servers, which creates no end of problems - Security, Compliance, and just general creepiness.

I look forward to learning more about your app! I'll certainly try it out when it launches ;)

Can you expand on this a bit? I work at Nilas, which provides sync for email, contacts, and calendar sync, along with modern REST APIs. https://nilas.com/sync_engine

We've had a lot of developers choose to use our infrastructure instead of interfacing with the various different providers and protocols (include Exchange). Usually security/compliance isn't an issue, but I'm looking to learn more about where folks have concerns, and ways we can address them. (Potentially doing everything from FHE to shipping AMIs.)

Thanks! You can also ping me directly at mg@nilas.com.

I currently have 20GB of email lying around on several mail services. There is no way I want to allow an additional app to my personal mail account for email management. The fact that I'm hosting my mail somewhere else is bad enough. I'm paying money for mail hosting since I want the person running the service to keep my data safe and confidential.

I'm currently happy directly accessing my email via web, Mail.app and Maildroid. Using a mail processing provider would mean that I would need to read another TOS to make sure my data is not sold/processed/used. If a mail client isn't able to speak standard imap and process the data locally then I don't even want to use it.

Maybe you should license your imap/api code for these thirdparty developers.

Unless you're PGP'ing everything that comes and goes from your mailbox, you have Z E R O guaranteed security. Sure your mail server host may claim that they are hosting only, but you can never be sure that an employee has not gone rouge. What if the host decides to start monitoring your mail server upstream?

Host the server at home instead? Well do you trust your ISP? I imagine you don't.

Trust along the entire transit of the message, as well as the final destination? Can't there either.

So in the end it doesn't matter if there's yet another service in the middle. API or host or anything. If you're not encrypting it locally it doesn't matter. Period. The only point you can sell on is you are removing a service that can cause a point of failure. But don't act like it's more secure than before.

Using your logic you have to send me all your passwords. I'll take them by email please.

(And don't bother to PGP encrypt them as you can't trust the Debian GnuPG maintainer either.)

> Using your logic you have to send me all your passwords. I'll take them by email please.

Where the heck was that written? That's not how Public / Private Keys work AT ALL.

> (And don't bother to PGP encrypt them as you can't trust the Debian GnuPG maintainer either.)

You do realize you can download, review, and compile from source? It's called Open Source for that very reason.

I expect more of an educated response on Hacker News than the one you have just demonstrated here.

While I generally agree, there is always the caveat of the Ken Thompson hack: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/184874/is-ken...

I'm not sure your "all or nothing" approach is feasible. Reducing your attack surface is a worthwhile security pursuit.

But that's how security works. Reducing the surface area is great, nothing wrong with that. However, the system is only as strong as the weakest link. E-mail is hilariously insecure, so just avoiding a single layer, API, or applications and calling it done is not enough.

I'm well aware of that. Right now it's just as important for me to try to manage my security and privacy.

Hosting the mail server at home would be a possibility (we have a fiber connection). I could also place a server in the datacenter of a friend and do the mail hosting myself. I don't want to spend the time to manage my email hosting since I'm depending on it. Running your own mailserver is not as easy as it sounds like. It's rather time consuming when you want to do it in a sound way: - Spam filtering - DKIM - SPF - Security etc... Sure I could follow a $random_tutorial but then I would surely miss a couple of best practices. I don't think this time is well spent because I'm paying other people more knowledgeable about email to do it for me. That's a conscious decision I made. I rather not have an additional party involved when I see no need.

Please note that also used to run/help run a couple of large mail servers. So I have a general idea how they behave and what to do.

Indeed! It's not just about privacy either. The less the reliance on someone else's servers the less likely that a subsequent shutdown is going to impact you (whether by acquisition or otherwise).

FWIW I'd like to see approaches like this applied to personal servers so that the device doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting but the code still runs close to the user. The approach I'm taking is based on unikernels http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

I can't tell for what OS this is, and unless you're planning to make it for both android and ios, please put the fact that it's only for one, and which it is, top and large on your site.

There is little that makes me think worse of a company than having it breathlessly describe a product i actually want, without telling me whether i can actually use it.

Screen previews are wrapped in an iPhone, so I'm guessing iOS.

True but not uncommon to just use one device for the marketing. Also went looking for the platform icons myself as I would have tried this out on Android.

I really do hope there's an android version planned. It'd be great to have some competition in the field of "intelligent email clients". Inbox is doing a great job, but it's for Gmail only.

Same. I added myself in the "get early access" and then thought, wait is this even for my OS?

Literally every single product image uses an iPhone, and the real product photo is also clearly an iPhone.

Just because it doesn't have a big image or text with OS compatibility does not mean you can't intelligently determine based on the product photos what OS it's for. If it were for Android, they'd have at least one Android photo, or specifically mention Android compatibility. If it's a completely iOS-centric page, you can guess /quite easily/ it's iOS only.

I don't know anyone with an iphone and rarely see pictures of them. As such, i simply am not familiar enough with them to figure out whether it's an android or iphone just by looking at it, especially since the UI is very generic and android mods and ISP OSes plentiful.

They're pretty different.

iOS 7 (8 is pretty much the same): http://now.avg.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ios7_homescree...

Android Lollipop: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Android_5...

Furthermore, I doubt they'd do anything crazy if they were to show an Android app. It's usually stock or very few mods.

The main thing I'm looking for is automatic segregation in between Outlook and Gmail. I'd like 1 more bucket in Outlook so that other splits between sorta important and not important. Gmail segregates by type which is not always the best proxy for importance.

I'd like a Focused bucket which is senders I know, replies to me emails and otherwise important stuff (important enough that I want the iOS notification). The middle bucket is stuff I occasionally open. The third bucket is stuff I haven't unsubscribed to yet for whatever reason.

You seem to be trying to resolve 2 different pains at once: email overload and privacy. Regarding the former, Google seems to be doing a lot of the same stuff already (categorization, calendar event extraction, ...). Do you have your unique edge? Or is the differentiation mainly in not being tied to Gmail?

Not OP, but I look at this not as trying to solve email overload and privacy, but as trying to solve email overload with the nifty side benefit of being more privacy-conscious than many of the alternatives.

Would love to hear more about the NLP approaches you've been using, and how well they've generalized to other folks. Though that may be giving away too much of the secret sauce, of course.

Quick question: Does this use the Schema.org JSON+LD descriptions to trigger information (as opposed to or in addition to it's own detection?)

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