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Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

mortenjust.com

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Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#11

Post by buro9 »

jsnell wrote: post #7

That's one of the things that etacts ( http://www.etacts.com ) does. Though when this was discussed here a few weeks ago in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144560 a lot of people seemed unhappy about it being an external service that needed to permanently store your gmail password.

I still really want that service. But my gmail controls access to everything and I cannot overcome the risk associated with divulging my password to a third party.

No bells and whistles on Gmail is worth risking the security of the email, and that is precisely what is being asked when we're asked to give our password to a third party. And there are examples of such abuse of trust, you only have to look at the court case about Facebook execs using passwords to login to email accounts of competitors.

So yes, etacts looks wonderful. But it doesn't offer something so compelling that I would give out my password. It's actually very hard for me to imagine what could be so compelling that I would give out that password.

Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#12

Post by pieter »

jgrahamc wrote: post #10

Funny I had been planning to build something like this. My idea was that you would forward an email to the service and just type in the start of it when you want the reminder. Using some simple NLP you'd be able to write something like "next week" or "on Monday" and the system would then email you back when it wanted to remind you. No need to have your gmail password, or even be gmail specific. Is there anyone out th…

How would this detect whether you got a reply? Relying on the recipient to also CC the reminder service seems fragile and ugly, and having to proxy through another service also seems unwanted (you're now relying on that service to be available for you to receive email).

Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#13

Post by sparky »

buro9 wrote: post #11
jsnell wrote: post #7

That's one of the things that etacts ( http://www.etacts.com ) does. Though when this was discussed here a few weeks ago in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144560 a lot of people seemed unhappy about it being an external service that needed to permanently store your gmail password.

I still really want that service. But my gmail controls access to everything and I cannot overcome the risk associated with divulging my password to a third party. No bells and whistles on Gmail is worth risking the security of the email, and that is precisely what is being asked when we're asked to give our password to a third party. And there are examples of such abuse of trust, you only have to look at the court c…

A valid concern. This prompted them to implement oAuth for GMail, as described here http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/gmail-imap-etacts/ and discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172211 .

Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#16

Post by billybob »

This seems really dysfunctional to me. "The ball is in your court, so I shouldn't have to do anything else..." and "right now, the person who follows up is the one who cares most about it." (not exact quotes)

Well, imagine you're on the receiving end, and it's an annoying email that you don't care to respond to. Do you want to keep getting automated repeats, where all the pain is yours, or do you want it to be somewhat painful for the person sending to have to take the time to re-send?

Yes, it's courteous to respond, even if to politely say "not interested, can't do it, go away." But to be auto-spammed if you don't!?

Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#17

Post by smarterchild »

You could put that together with this: http://3mindme.com/

Say: "I would like an email back about this email in 1 week."

Disadvantages to this:

* Your email goes out to them and gets stored for that long.

* You have to remember to include it as a bcc on every email you care about following up with.

* It doesn't automatically snooze if you get a followup.

* You have no way of tracking responses (in, say, a DB).

But it's a cheap solution that will do the job. Otherwise, there are special CRM packages for this. Unfortunately, I don't know much about them.

Re: Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail

#20

Post by apowell »

Even better would be to integrate the anti-shelving filter with a GTD app (I use Things) so that I don't have to create a separate task every time I want to create a followup reminder.

However, I would never want to send an auto-notification to the receiving party (often they're my customers -- how rude is that?).

I'd be annoyed if I was on the receiving end of the auto-reminder.

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