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Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

adios.ai

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Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#31

Post by wolfgang42 »

If anybody wants to do this to their own GMail account without putting trust in a third party, this is pretty easy to do with the little-known Google Apps Script. You can write JavaScript that will run on Google's servers and do whatever you want to your account. (I use this to archive various automated emails if I haven't bothered to look at them, to keep them from cluttering my inbox after they're obsolete.)

Here's a script which I think should do the job, assuming you have a filter set up to move all incoming mail to a label called 'hidden_mail' (warning: untested!):

    function checkMail() {
        GmailApp.moveThreadsToInbox(GmailApp.search('label:hidden_mail'));
    }
Just create a new project on https://script.google.com/ , paste in this code, and then Edit > Current Project's Triggers and add a trigger to run checkMail() on whatever schedule you want.

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#32

Post by trevz »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #30
tagspace wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for jumping in josefresco. Exactly. Two big reasons we built it: 1. the discipline to only check emails X times a day is unfortunately not one that comes naturally to us, and 2. a large part of our job is replying to and dealing with emails, so we still wanted to be able to be in our inbox (to find the relevant information for a current task), but don't want new emails jumping up and interrupting our flow. So…

So this is the (choose one) not-free-in-the-future/temporary third-party-server-side equivalent of telling Mail.app/Exchange/Thunderbird to check for new mail every few hours instead of every minute. But those configurations are free and forever without any "we reserve the right to change the terms at any time" bogus ToS. Is that about right?

Some of the advantages vs using your Mail app to do this are:

1. it works across all your devices (as works at the gmail server level)

2. you can set exceptions (e.g. email from mygirlfriend@gmail.com should always arrive immediately)

Took us 10 days to build, and costs us nothing to run. No intention to monetize (we run a BI platform called trevor.io which pays our salaries. Feel free to check it out if you want to support us :) ).

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#33

Post by trevz »

cimmanom wrote: post #28
michaelmior wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference is that this controls your notifications as well. If I decide to only check email 3 times per day, then I have to turn notifications off for that to be effective. This means I may miss emails which need a reply sooner.

How is that different from this? You'd still be missing email that needs a reply sooner.

One useful difference is that you can set exceptions (i.e. email addresses that you want to receive emails from immediately).

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#34

Post by michaelmior »

trevz wrote: post #25
michaelmior wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume like with similar services you need to give Gmail API access which does afford the possibility of them reading all your emails (although I assume they don't).

Exactly right. Adios just requests API access. The way it works: 1. creates a filter that filters your incoming emails into a hidden gmail label 2. at your chosen times we use the gmail api to move the emails back in to the inbox. Adios never ever accesses the content of your emails, for any reason.

It's unfortunate that the Gmail API doesn't offer more granular permissions that would actually not allow Adios to access email contents. Even if I trust you, any breach of Adios could mean that my email contents are public.

Not bashing the service at all though. I'm a current user of Boomerang which has the same caveats.

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#35

Post by ben509 »

anontechworker wrote: post #12

This would be nice for slack, except if you’re mentioned you’ll still get a notification.

That's essentially how I try to use Slack, but when everyone else is monitoring constantly you're simply out of most convos.

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#36

Post by trevz »

michaelmior wrote: post #34
trevz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly right. Adios just requests API access. The way it works: 1. creates a filter that filters your incoming emails into a hidden gmail label 2. at your chosen times we use the gmail api to move the emails back in to the inbox. Adios never ever accesses the content of your emails, for any reason.

It's unfortunate that the Gmail API doesn't offer more granular permissions that would actually not allow Adios to access email contents. Even if I trust you, any breach of Adios could mean that my email contents are public. Not bashing the service at all though. I'm a current user of Boomerang which has the same caveats.

Totally agree.

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#39

Post by nwsm »

trevz wrote: post #27
michaelmior wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust that you don't access email content, but I assume that with the permissions that are granted you could , correct?

Adios needs the ability to change the label on emails (in order to move them into the inbox at your chosen times). This permission is unfortunately also the permission needed to access emails. If you know anyone at Google who can change this, please let us know ;) as we're keen to ask for as little permission as possible. Importantly though, the content of emails never ever hits our system. The API calls we use only…

But in the future you could store them and users wouldn't know something changed, correct?

Re: Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day

#40

Post by the_duke »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #31

If anybody wants to do this to their own GMail account without putting trust in a third party, this is pretty easy to do with the little-known Google Apps Script. You can write JavaScript that will run on Google's servers and do whatever you want to your account. (I use this to archive various automated emails if I haven't bothered to look at them, to keep them from cluttering my inbox after they're obsolete.) Here's…

That's an awesome solution, thanks!
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