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Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#12Your biggest challenge will be with users. Just imagine if you tell someone "Just email me using shortwhale.com/danariely". My mom and most non-hn friends would enter that in the "To:" section of their email client. Users are stupid, and email is unfortunately an overdeveloped idea from an age long past. Attempts to replace it invariably face resistance from the multitudes of users who wouldn't react well with change…
Could it be setup to work like email whitelisting? When an unknown sender sends an email they get an autoreply back with a link to shortwhale.
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#13These guidelines work pretty good for me: http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/email.html.en, basically:
* Plain text only
* Proper subject
* No long signatures
* No nonsense
* UTF-8
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#14I can see how it may work when someone needs something from Dan. However if I am contacting him for his own benefit (something as mundane as reporting a typo on his website) I am most certainly won't jump through these hoops.
This is not too different from those obnoxious anti-spam services that require you to click on a link and solve a captcha before delivering your email to the recipient. That's just a No, because you make me do extra work for your own convenience even though I am already ultimately doing you a favor by replying to your email.
In other words, this form works as a mechanism to discourage emails from people who don't need anything from the recipient.
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#15[deleted]
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Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#16This puts too much burden on the sending user. I think a better idea would be something that reads the email, categorizes it, and provides a short one or two sentence summary of what it's about.
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#17Am I expected to watch 15 minutes of videos in order to understand how and what to email Dan? It's an interesting choice - in the context of efficiency and saving time - to decide to put in videos (and some >3 minutes) to watch in the FAQ.
While I appreciate that a lot of email is a problem for many people - solutions need to be aware of the preciousness of everyone's time not just yours (the recipient's).
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#18[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#19Urgh, URL is not linked. Does it work in the comments? http://shortwhale.com http://shortwhale.com/danariely
Double-click URL, right-click, open link.
Re: Show HN: Shortwhale – Get fewer, shorter, and better emails
#20This puts too much burden on the sending user. I think a better idea would be something that reads the email, categorizes it, and provides a short one or two sentence summary of what it's about.
There's already a tool that does this. Check out http://www.sanebox.com/.