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FWD:Everyone

fwdeveryone.com

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Re: FWD:Everyone

#111

Post by Alex3917 »

Spivak wrote: post #96
Alex3917 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protocols don’t talk about copyright explicitly, but they talk about replying and forwarding. Both of those behaviors are only legal if there is an implicit grant of copyright to the recipient.

That line of logic doesn't work. A protocol is neither legal not illegal. It would be like saying that Swedish is illegal. The law largely doesn't care how you do something. It's also not a necessary condition because an internal company mail server wouldn't run into copyright issues since the company owns the copyright on all their employees' work. "Uploading a copyrighted work that I downloaded via GET with POST mu…

> A protocol is neither legal not illegal.

My point is that when you send someone something you've written as an email, it constitutes an informal agreement (essentially a private contract) with the recipient.

> It's also not a necessary condition because an internal company mail server wouldn't run into copyright issues since the company owns the copyright on all their employees' work.

That's true, but anyone with a company email address is legally considered a representative of the company. (That's why you always need to deactivate people's email addresses when they leave.) So while the company (almost) always owns the copyright over work created, the employee is able to dual license that content by sending it via email.

Anyway just to be clear we're not saying you should go ahead and dox all your friends. We're not ad supported, that doesn't benefit us at all. (If your first experience with the site is getting doxxed, you're probably not going to sign up, and almost certainly aren't going to start paying for the business product.)

Re: FWD:Everyone

#112

Post by Alex3917 »

canada_dry wrote: post #94
Alex3917 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really hope this does well (because I'd like to discover more interesting and useful content). Thanks! Expect to see more content in the near future. And we definitely need to redo our front page and incorporate more cool content. It's a lot better than when we launched, but I feel like we haven't quite hit a level of professionalism that's reflective of the rest of the site. We’re trying to avoid raising capital…

If you want the old school Fortune 500 folks you should take aim at Sharepoint. It's still how this kind of thing (internal corporate blogging) gets done at big old corporate beasts. Do you even have a sharepoint add-in?

Thanks for the advice. We've been talking with a couple Fortune 500 companies who are using Exchange and Sharepoint, so if we end up building out an enterprise deployment for them then we'll probably end up doing this. I don't want to start building out enterprise stuff though until we have a paying enterprise customer who is asking for specific things. The product is good enough for enterprise, the real issue is just making sure the upload process is aligned with the workflows of people within the company so that way the effort and cognitive overhead of contributing is low enough that lots of documentation gets created.

Re: FWD:Everyone

#113

Post by amsheehan »

welly wrote: post #89
Alex3917 wrote: post #3

Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but basically things that we've done since launching: - 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po... - We now supp…

I registered and verified my email address, and then tried to log in only to find it didn't accept my password. The "reset password" doesn't respond or do anything so I'm unable to log in or reset my password.

Please reach out to myself or Alex to get this worked out:

alex.krupp@fwdeveryone.com alex.sheehan@fwdeveryone.com

Re: FWD:Everyone

#114

Post by pseudalopex »

apk-d wrote: post #74
foo101 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually talk with one another when they're not on stage. I am having a hard time understanding if this is written sincerely or as satire. I hope you are being humorous here because if this is indeed true, it does not look like something I would appreciate. I really don't w…

I feel like everyone here is misinterpreting what the author meant. The site doesn't publish your messages without consent. In fact, from their FAQ: > When uploading a thread as an individual, we email a permission request to each non-anonymized person who contributed at least one message to conversation. A thread will only go live if there is unanimous consent. This means that if even one person hits 'Decline' or do…

"Permission requests are becoming optional": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460708

Re: FWD:Everyone

#115

Post by amsheehan »

elcritch wrote: post #27
Alex3917 wrote: post #3

Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but basically things that we've done since launching: - 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po... - We now supp…

Certainly intriguing. I _really_ like the notion of automatically correlating and tagging work emails to internal business content, or wiki. Not sure about the "public" tracking side of the site.

Both of us come from situations where this product would have saved so much time and energy in a business setting. It really influenced our design of the org and repo features. Let us know if you have any questions or want to kick the tires in an organization setting.

hello@fwdeveryone.com

Re: FWD:Everyone

#116

Post by amsheehan »

tylermenezes wrote: post #109

I don't use Gmail. Is there a way to forward an email as the name implies, or does it only work with Gmail?

Currently we rely on the gmail API, but it is on our roadmap to expand to the other major email providers. Is there one in particular that you would like to see on FWD:Everyone?

Re: FWD:Everyone

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #35
mirimir wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's still the default. That's good to know. > There are lots of legitimate use cases for publishing stuff without permission though, e.g. emails from Steve Jobs or whatever. Just because he's dead, and was a public figure, is it morally acceptable to publish private email? Or even legal, without permission from his estate? A quick search gives me the following. https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/04/is-i…

In terms of legality there are two separate issues, invasion of privacy and copyright. Things like privacy / libel / slander generally don't apply to the deceased, so in this case I think we can safely ignore that. With respect to copyright, when you send someone an email you're using an agreed upon protocol (RFC 5322, RFC 5598, etc.) that implicitly grants the recipient a copyright. Now you can say this is a bad arg…

Sending an email gives an implicit copyright license, but that license is related to how emails are normally understood to be used. It's not a total license to do anything with.

Re: FWD:Everyone

#119

Post by Alex3917 »

natdempk wrote: post #105
Alex3917 wrote: post #3

Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but basically things that we've done since launching: - 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po... - We now supp…

I’m really impressed by the email parsing success. How did you tackle the hellscape that is parsing replies out of emails?

Thanks! I didn't really understand all the email specs when I started working on the parser, so it was mostly written using guess and check.

For plaintext emails without forwards, we use a slightly modified version of Email Reply Parser to strip replies. We made a couple changes so that messages with inline replies aren't stripped.

The next step is running everything through through BeautifulSoup. We use this to strip out most of the garbage from the HTML and rewrite it to make it beautiful. For example, paragraph text within divs gets unwrapped and placed within paragraphs. And text within divs that's styled to look like blockquotes gets placed within actual blockquote elements. This is not only good for SEO, but makes it easy for us to normalize the typography and style across threads to create a consistent reading experience.

There's also some logic here for formatting emails from things like Zendesk and Mixmax correctly. And this is also where the highlighting and redaction get applied.

Right now we just unwrap text within tables and place it in paragraph elements, I need to change this algorithm a little though to allow actual tabular data.

The next step is running the text through Bleach, first to linkify any plaintext URLs (and sanitize URLs), and next to remove all the remaining markup and attributes we don't allow.

Then you enter the death field of regex. The algorithm we use to unwrap text within divs and tables creates some extra whitespace before and after the newly created elements, so when you have nested divs and tables some of this needs to be stripped. We also strip out semantically invalid markup and empty elements. E.g. there is a lot of stuff that looks vaguely like this:

body = body.replace('', '')

The last step is that we run everything through BeautifulSoup again to make sure the whole thing is idempotent. I hear this isn't the Computer Science approved method of guaranteeing idempotence, but in this case it works. (Basically there are just a couple cases where the regex can lead to having unbalanced tags, so we need to make sure it's valid markup again.)

Overall the whole process is pretty easy to read and understand, and it generally produces better results than Gmail so I'm pretty happy with it. If we were processing millions of emails per hour I'd probably put more work into making it more efficient, but for now it's fast enough to feel instantaneous even for threads with dozens of messages.

Re: FWD:Everyone

#120

Post by amsheehan »

CaptainZeepzorp wrote: post #118

Ahh this is such a great idea for a website!! Hope it takes off, it would be so great to see correspondences between professors or politicians.

Thank you! We hope so too. There's so much first hand knowledge locked up in inboxes that people would like to share.
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