waseemsadiq

For starters simple integration with your social feed, just for quick scanning.

Then there are all these next-gen features: - In Inbox2 I built something Rapportive like but used your social connections (mind you that was almost 3 years ago), that can defnately be improved with services such as FullContact now adays

- I did a priority inbox type of thing that IMO still performs better then Google priority inbox, I never released it tho and its not part of the open source codebase as well. The difference was that it did ranking based on the social relationship you had with a person (so even counting things like FB messages, tweets, etc).

- Best of all is Inbox2's search feature tho, its people centric. The idea is that generally you might not be able to find back an email based on keywords but you almost always know the person or the company that sent you the email. Inbox2 alsready has the first iteration of this feature, search doesnt start at fulltext but al the person that sent you the email. Sparrow has something kind of where you can search on emails but the way I built it was on aggregated profiles of people (so even if you had 4 email addresses and 1 facebook profile it would still know it was you).

Then there are also all these next-gen features around improving email productivity. Just an example:

- Marking an email that I send as a task. We often send emails witch are like "hey can you do this for me", then we are at the mercy of the other end actually actually sending us a "done" reply. yes I know about asana and all these other things but fact of the matter is that most tas assignment STILL happens in email.

My client would allow you to mark an email as a task, the receiving end woud actually see a task popup and our email clients would be able to communicate with each other around the status of that task.

Oh and also check out the built in GTD functinality, where you have built in buttons for "todo", "read later" and "maybe someday" type of things.

(I used to run my own cloud based e-mail aggregator www.inbox2.com)

The primary problem with these services is that they have to pull content and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every 2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them making it less processing intensive (push based systems).

There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle caps at about 35K connections per box.

You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.

We calculated that it cost us about 2 euros per month to support a free user providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".

Feature request: allow me to login with my github account and see some usage stats like nr. of views :-)

Suggestion for you: help out on this other e-mail client that exists asopen source and is desperate in need of some patching: https://github.com/waseems/inbox2_desktop :-)) (disclaimer: I am the original author of inbox2)

Nice work Ryan

- Waseem

SEEKING FREELANCE DESIGNER FOR IOS APP

Remote, can get started immediately

(please only respond when you have actually designed apps that are in the app store, you would be surprised how often I get replies from people that would like to learn to design for iOS ;-))

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[email protected]

SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote

We have two freelance positions available for www.fileboard.com

Developer

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- iOS developer with a specific interest in how pdf files work. We need someone to hack on open-source projects such as github.com/KurtCode/PDFKitten. Java experience for some server-side stuff is a plus.

/* alternative profile */

- Allround developer with iOS / Java / .NET / Ruby know-how helping out everywhere from bug fixing to new features. If you exist, we need to talk :-)

Designer

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- Graphics designer for icons, app screens, etc

Contact waseem at fileboard.com for details

Lol @ thinking that IMAP and gmail are the same thing

Having spent the last 3 years of my life tackling this problem I would say I am pretty qualified to say this solution sucks.

And they are totally not solving the problems I mentioned, they are building a new mail client. Which tends to be a completely different thing.

Anyways just my 0.02$

Oh and I forgot to mention this is horribly expensive to scale.

We calculated that it cost us about 1.20 euro do keep this up per user per month. And mind you these costs were primarily network bound so it doesn't matter if you have faster hardware.

There are some optimization techniques you can do to bring this down (for example use imap push) but with gmail you are looking at about 2K connections per IP, you do the math.

Actually you can do this (and we are doing this through partners) on the cheap but the experience you can provide will not be appealing unless it is an add-on experience on an existing product.

I already built this back in 2009

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/inbox2-one-inbox-and-commun...

And here is the desktop client which is now open-source: http://www.techshout.com/img/inbox2.jpg

People do not need this and will not leave their existing email clients because they simply do not see email as being 'stagnated'. It works and gets the job done.

There are lots of problems to fix around email, but a new inbox interface is not one of them.

My advice to you would be to go build on top of for example gmail. There are massive number of things that suck horribly. Yes, search is one of them.

Inbox navigation is another one, but keep in mind that there is a reason why the current line based inbox interfaces work.

The third one is attachments, but that is one I am already tackling with my new startup www.fileboard.com

So 3 years ago I had exactly the same idea. I executed on it, built an email client and it was basically a commercial failure (although we ended up licensing some of our stuff).

So here is my advice: don't even bother unless you want to build a small lifestyle business (and don't even bother dreaming of a subscription model).

Email has been around for 20 something years and the usage patterns are so engraved in users mindsets there is no way you can get them out of that experience. The whole idea around productivity will only appeal to a small set of power users.

If you really are set on building this thing then here is a howto: 1. go here: https://github.com/waseems/inbox2_desktop 2. fork the code 3. add a todo list 4. compile and profit (well probably not)

Sorry for being so cynical but I have been there :-)

SEEKING FREELANCER for Fileboard. We need a hardcore ios/objective-c developer to help out with turning the iPad (and other tablets) into a device that you can actually work on. waseem at fileboard dot com. Remote work is not only a possibility, but a preference :-)

Hmm was just thinking. Could I also use this for tracking internal transactions? I am still looking for a good solution to get insight into the statistical/live transactions that my system is handling.

User behavior is great but since our solution spans multiple servers I would love to be able to see what happens say for ex. when somebody wants to send a e-mail message with dropbox attachment through our system.

Also tracking the nr of errors being raised would be mighty interesting. I know there are third party solutions out there that solve part of the equation but having this data in one place sounds pretty interesting.

Any thoughts?

Awesome! At Fileboard we use lots of third party tools (Mixpanel/KISSMetrics) to keep track of user metrics and stuff but there are always things where these tools just can't provide us with answers. Especially since we are an ipad app and most of these things are designed for web app usage.

I didn't want to roll my own solution for keeping track of the "extra" stuff but having seen this I am definatly going to give it a spin and see wether it helps us get more grip on user behavior.

Thanks for sharing!

I will probably do a full blog post today on all the questions asked here then submit that to HN

1. correct 2. not as a paying fulltime job, but still probably around 30-40 hours a week 3. good luck with that, I also thought I could whip up the first version in 3 months... :-) Its not writing the code that takes so damn long its getting the machine and the user experience/expectance aligned.

thx, yes and yes :-)

Actually make sure that you choose the x86 in the configuration manager dropdown and everything goes away.

Sorry, should have mentioned it in the README, will update later

Hmm build the installer yourself if you don't trust it, beauty of open source :-)

Interesting though...

Well the cloud is always on and online. Additionally we want to work with metadata which we want to store in the cloud and is not supported by for ex. the IMAP protocol. I can't go into to much details regarding our product roadmap but having a cloud backend really helps.

Another concrete case is new email notifications. When our ipad is not the active app we simply are not able to inform you when new mail arrives (due to apple background app restrictions). With a client/cloud hybrid we can do the heavy lifting on the client and use the cloud for example to send notifications when new mail arrives.

Thanks thats helpfull, I'll add a licence tonight (probably BSD)

Hah didn't even know that was in there! :-)

Its native objective-c / built in xcode

Well not entirely true, that other post is actually about a experimental gmail plugin that I made. It hooked up in gmail and added something that we call the people centric inbox, never released tho

Follow the instructions on this page: https://culturedcode.com/things/wiki/index.php/Sending_crash... but e-mail them to [email protected]

Thanks!

I will compile an installer version later. Keep an eye on the github page for updates.

We just released a new version to the app store like 15 minutes ago, try again. Could you send me a crash report to [email protected] otherwise? thx