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Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

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Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#41

Post by filipt »

avinashjdsouza wrote: post #39

OK, I'm loving a couple of things: 1. As someone in sales, there are a truckload of emails I send out each day. Contrary to what a lot of people think, no, we don't send out templated stuff blindly. I think EE should be able to help me shave off about half an hour in think-time in a a day. Huge. 2. Organic-ish. Early days, I know, but I'm hoping that EE won't devolve to a glorified SmartReply with additional text tem…

Awesome! so happy to hear you've enjoyed it so far. We've got a ton of additional things coming up for you, and no, they're not going to make us SmartReply!

Almost definitely a yes to an Outlook extension coming up - we're just making sure now that we're doing a good enough job on Gmail before we start porting over to another platform :)

Hey - any chance you could email me at filip@easyemail.ai? I'd love to set up a phone call to hear how we could be better for you. Thanks!

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#42

Post by filipt »

russ_ross wrote: post #40

I'd like to see you auto suggest frequent attachments. In some ways this should be a more accessible feature, and certainly useful.

Really great idea! I put it down so that we can work on it in the near future. There seems to be a lot of privacy issues with attachments. Do you have any suggestion on how you'd like us to deal with it? Is it something you're worried about at all?

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#43

Post by rajeevk »

TheDong wrote: post #21
filipt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear that! I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that issue. Privacy and security are extremely high on our priority list since email is such an intimate communication channel.

> I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that issue. Perhaps you could have a privacy policy which clearly states no text from user emails will be looked at by humans. It's possible, though not easy, for a limited form of client-side encryption to be used while still offering autocomplete; e.g. if each word is encrypted client-side with a per-client secret, an encrypted "next word" could be determined a…

> Perhaps you could have a privacy policy which clearly states no text from user emails will be looked at by humans.

I don't think this would be practically possible. As these guys have to improve algorithm for better suggestion, someone has to look at the suggestion and the context to improve the algorithm.

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#44

Post by bluesign »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #7
BjoernKW wrote: post #3

Have you read Avogadro Corp ( http://avogadrocorp.com/ )? That novel is based on the premise of a tool that is intended to help you write well-crafted emails yet quickly gets out of hand. I'm not suggesting at all this will be the case here but this seems related and might be an interesting read.

That was my first thought as well. My second thought was the Cory Doctorow story which predicted that the first true AI will be the result of a machine learning spambot and a machine learning antispam bot getting stuck in an arms race. This tech would make for an excellent means for spammers and malware authors to bypass spam filters easily. 1)Infect user. 2)Generate new content based on old emails. 3)Infect everyone…

Or more simpler:

Use same content, change attachment

Sadly I came across this before

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#45

Post by kazanz »

filipt wrote: post #35
kazanz wrote: post #30

I find a couple things irksome, if not malicious. 1. The link to the privacy policy comes AFTER you take all my data. 2. If I uninstall your extension you have it programmed to give me an exit survey, but it doesn't prompt me to revoke access for your app from my account? So you can continue to read all my communications. At the very least tell me how to remove it when I uninstall your extension, or fill out your exi…

Thanks so much for all the feedback, I really appreciate it. 1. We're sharing our privacy policy on our chrome extension webstore page - did you manage to see it there? If not, we should definitely do a much better job presenting it, so thank you for pointing it out. 2. So sorry, definitely don't want to hide anything! We'll push out the changes asap to show our users how to remove your permissions. We stop looking a…

Hey, Didn't see it on the webpage store. I expected it to be on the welcome message I saw in the store. Probably due to similar experiences.

Yes, you need to remove permissions. That is absolutely imperative. Do you delete the data after uninstall?

Perhaps give an option checkbox in your initial walkthrough of the app to allow the footer only on emails using EasyEmail.

I retracted #4. The first email I got after the loading robot screen made me think the "learning" was complete. I got an email much later saying it was complete. The UX confused me. Perhaps instead of popping up generic message before the learning is done, you can show a message, still analyzing data. So I cannot in good faith comment on the suggestion quality.

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#46

Post by JackC »

Congratulations on the launch!

I hope you take to heart the privacy concerns here. In case you haven't come across it, here's a useful thread from last year about Unroll.me's datamining and selling of customers' inboxes, and the general trust problem for services like yours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077

Frankly I'm not sure what it would take to convince me to open up email text access to a 3rd party service at this point.

You have to convince me not just that you (Fil, Lambert and Matt) are trustworthy, but also that the three of you can't be bought out by someone less trustworthy (bearing in mind that your customers may well be worth more to a shady business than they are to you!), and also that you're competent to run a hugely valuable database without ever making a mistake (quoting tptacek in the above thread: in your place, "I would be terrified.")

I don't know how you would crack this, but on the risk-of-hacking side as a user I might be looking for technical reassurance -- say, that you're running entirely locally instead of storing my email on your server in the first place, or that you're only using temporary email access to store sentences with k-anonymity or client-side encryption, and that your privacy model has been published in detail for review.

On the risk-of-purchase side you could look at Keith Porcaro and Sean McDonald's idea of the Civic Trust, where a private company's data is owned by an independent trust that can protect the interests of your users, separate from the vagaries of your business model:

https://medium.com/@McDapper/the-civic-trust-e674f9aeab43 http://digitalpublic.io/

My feedback here may amount to concern trolling, since I'm over on the paranoid end of potential customers these days and probably not your target audience -- but I'm passing it on in case it's helpful ...

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#47

Post by filipt »

kazanz wrote: post #45
filipt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much for all the feedback, I really appreciate it. 1. We're sharing our privacy policy on our chrome extension webstore page - did you manage to see it there? If not, we should definitely do a much better job presenting it, so thank you for pointing it out. 2. So sorry, definitely don't want to hide anything! We'll push out the changes asap to show our users how to remove your permissions. We stop looking a…

Hey, Didn't see it on the webpage store. I expected it to be on the welcome message I saw in the store. Probably due to similar experiences. Yes, you need to remove permissions. That is absolutely imperative. Do you delete the data after uninstall? Perhaps give an option checkbox in your initial walkthrough of the app to allow the footer only on emails using EasyEmail. I retracted #4. The first email I got after the…

Got it, makes sense. I'll make sure to update that soon! Thank you for the suggestion.

We delete data the second we don't have access to users' account. However, we don't store any new data after you uninstall us. The reason is that there's actually no way of tracking who uninstalls us - Chrome Extensions are not providing any real support for it. We're looking into it, and will retroactively remove all data from users who uninstalled us.

Brilliant idea! We'll make the checkbox more visible! Got it, sorry about that. Please let me know what you think once you get some time to play with the extension! Thank you so much again for the feedback, it's incredibly valuable.

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#48

Post by filipt »

JackC wrote: post #46

Congratulations on the launch! I hope you take to heart the privacy concerns here. In case you haven't come across it, here's a useful thread from last year about Unroll.me's datamining and selling of customers' inboxes, and the general trust problem for services like yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077 Frankly I'm not sure what it would take to convince me to open up email text access to a 3rd party…

Thank you! That's extremely useful - definitely not concern trolling. We recognize how important email is to our users, so we definitely want to resolve those issues!

We're incorporating some of the things you've already mentioned (client-side decryption, better sanitization), but we'll be a lot more cautious moving forward. You brought up really excellent points, so thank you for sharing those with us!

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#49

Post by gordon_freeman »

filipt wrote: post #37
gordon_freeman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think along with this TOY-ness, YC also looks for the available market and in this case I do not see that with this app. maybe the idea is to get some traction and sell it to Google down the road?

That's good feedback - why do you think the available market is small? That's certainly a possibility, but for now we're just really focused on making the product really useful.

I maybe wrong but I see the email market in two ways: people who have two many emails which creates a scheduling problem. And people who reply/compose too many emails. I think the later market is not that big because you also need to make sure the people get more value (or should I say, write more emails) out of the monthly fees they pay for the service. But I'd like to be wrong here and I wish you succeed. Thanks.

Re: Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly

#50

Post by krishna2 »

filipt wrote: post #29
codegeek wrote: post #23

It is interesting to see Chrome Plugins being accepted into YC. Is the potential really worth a billion dollar market ? I would think that YC wants to invest in startups that could scale to high growth in a short span of time. Are Chrome plugins really worth that much ? Or perhaps this is just the MVP and idea is to scale it further ?

Great insight! Chrome extension is our MVP actually - over time we will certainly expand to other platforms (or even have our own email client!). We're already in the process for setting up a Gmail Add-on ( https://blog.google/products/g-suite/do-more-your-inbox-gmai... ) It also seems like we can keep going with a Chrome Extension for a bit - Streak, MixMax or even Grammarly are good examples of companies who are fo…

A lot of action nowadays happen on Mobile. How would this help with that?
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