ajaygoel

It's for important alerts that you need to act on right away. Email inboxes are cluttered. An SMS or iMessage gets your attention right away.

The user logs into his Gmail account on his own and uses the GMass extension, which operates within the Gmail UI, to create/schedule campaigns. On the back-end, GMass connects to the user's account over standard Google OAuth 2 to then send the emails.

Looks like someone has a lot of free time on his hands. I've received 4 emails I didn't sign up for in the last couple minutes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8e0qpvnzn23opg/Screenshot%202019-...

No it's not all client side. Just the interaction with the UI is client-side. All the heavy lifting is server-side.

Let me clarify. GMass doesn't send any email, but we do have to transmit the email to someone that does send it, hence the bandwidth costs.

My reaction was simply validating that sending from-gmail to-gmail has high open/conversion rates, as the poster stated. However, you can only do this with a limited number of emails (500/day for Gmail or 2,000/day for G Suite). That's not to say that Google will let ANYTHING be sent between Gmail and G Suite accounts. There are lots of cases where Gmail has blocked its own users from sending to each other.

ajay AT wordzen DOT com

Are you saying you've never received any benefit from an email you received that was part of a campaign? Like a discount to your favorite store? Not all uses are commercial, either. We have teachers who use it to communicate with all the parents of their students. A tennis club that emails out the week's upcoming schedule to all players. An HOA communicating with its residents.

Technically CAN-SPAM does not require an unsubscribe link. It requires providing instructions to be removed. That could be using the text, "reply back with the word 'unsubscribe'". We put the burden of legal compliance on our users, and the tradeoff is complete control over your message content.

You are correct. :)

The text you're quoting has to do with how we distribute volume, NOT how we enable spammers. High volume campaigns does not equate to spamming. You can send a 10-email campaign that IS spam and a 10,000-email campaign that is NOT spam.

Just FYI, I didn't come up with the title for the interview. The editors at IH did.

I absolutely did not create the JamesIH account. I have no idea who that is. From the "IH" part of it, I'm guessing someone that has something to do with Indie Hackers.

You're confusing a couple of issues. It's not that we're looking the other way. It's that I wanted to design a system where we don't have to look at all. GMass doesn't actually send any emails through its own servers. Emails are sent either through users' own Gmail accounts or through a third party SMTP service like SendGrid. Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers. THEY will shut down a user's account before I could ever even notice it. I don't have to look, because the owner of the email server will do the monitoring.

Agreed. I was arrogant in some of my blog post comments. I've changed my tune since then. For me, gaining confidence in my product and gaining traction turned me into a more customer-service friendly person.

Cancellation is instant and doesn't require an email being sent. You'll see that in the post.

You may be right. A better solution might be to build an external UI for account management, but I've shied away from that, wanting to keep everything inside Gmail. Maybe in the future though.

I could query my system and get numbers. My comments are based on the number of times I've heard a user say "Google shut down my account." It's maybe once a month. And then when I look at what they were sending, it's pretty spammy.

And if you're a G Suite user, and your G Suite domain otherwise has a good reputation, one single user may get "suspended" for 24 hours, but I've never seen a G Suite user permanently banned UNLESS the whole point of creating that G Suite account on a particular domain was to send out mass emails through every single user account.

Hi Omar! I'm eternally grateful to you, Chris, Aleem, and the entire InboxSDK team.

Open/click tracking doesn't add much in terms of cost. That traffic is minor. The bulk of the traffic is the transmission of the emails.

Here's January's bill: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt2qofjla2lnsg7/Screenshot%202019-...

It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm not embarrassed by it either. The upset commenters are the minority of our users. Some parts of our UI are a little difficult -- most commands have to be done via the Gmail Compose window, because we want the entire experience to be inside Gmail. That workflow is unnatural for some.

It does happen, but it's rare. You have to be a true spammer or phisher to get shut down, and we've found that Google is a lot more lenient with G Suite accounts than regular gmail.com accounts.

Right, I do have moderate-to-severe apnea, which is why I use the machine. But still, going from 10-11 hours/night to 5-6 and feeling great has been a big productivity booster.

All the extension does is provide a conduit between the Gmail UI and the Gmail API, really. Google's systems for detecting spammers are pretty good, so they're more likely to shut down a spamming account rather than my extension.

Hey everyone - someone just alerted me to this post. I'm Ajay, the person interviewed in that article. Let me go through now and respond to people's comments.

Hi everyone - since Dropbox is deprecating its Photos/Albums feature tomorrow, I built this! It creates a slideshow, viewable on any device, just from the URL of a shared Dropbox folder containing photos.