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Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"

getsmokesignal.com

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Re: Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"

#81

Post by VMG »

edw519 wrote: post #7

I appreciate a good hack, but just can't get past the idea that this is a solution in search of a problem. 2 Reasons I would never consider using this: 1. I don't want anyone to have any idea "how busy I am". Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the size of my inbox, like many other things, is no one's business but mine. 2. This effectively makes the sender the gatekeeper for deciding what's important. I want to be my own ga…

2 Reasons I would never consider using this

I'd never use it either, but I'd also wouldn't post nearly as much information on facebook as most of my friends do.

Ones own preferences might not always be a good indicator the public's preferences.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"

#82

Post by helen842000 »

I love looking at new sites like this, I think it's great to get the chance to see what others are working on. It tries to tackle an important problem but has a few forseeable side effects.

The most important points I can think of...

It's placed in the signature, it doesn't apply to anyone composing a new message, which is probably a large portion of mail.

It relies on the person sending the message to decide if their e-mail is urgent or not (everyone thinks THEIR message is urgent)

Anyone replying to your mail is probably someone you are waiting for a response from, so really you NEED them to e-mail you, so you can get work done.

It would probably lead to a lot of 'queue jumping', getting phone calls starting "I saw your mailbox is swamped so I thought I'd just call to ask XYZ..."

I do love that it auto updates so that you can see the current status even on an old mail.

Maybe it would be more useful to display an auto updating sig beacon that contains autoresponder info. Your frequent contacts can see what you're up to, if you're about, at a different site, on hol etc. That's closer to the "Away" button on messenger. It would save people typing out a whole e-mail to just get a bounceback message.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"

#83

Post by larsj45 »

Very nice, but is it customizable? Could I set it up myself to say that I'm busy now, and probably won't be able to reply soon, regardless of the amount of e-mail I have in my inbox? Or maybe could it somehow relate to the how many e-mails I have sent/read in the past few hours to understand if I've been going through them? Like "he has been to his inbox for x hours now, so please don't expect a quick answer right now..."
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