I was recently asking people for a way to translate emails into SMSs, so I could route my system alerts (from various places) to a single email and ensure I always get by SMS. It's a surprisingly hard problem right now, which Tray looks like it would solve elegantly if they get SMS right.
For those who don't like 3rd parties looking into mail and only have IMAP access to mail server, there is something called imapfilter. Basically, it acts as a headless e-mail client with Lua interface.
This reminds me a lot of the server-side procmail [0] and Sieve filters [1]. Perhaps this was even the inspiration for such a project, who knows?
But tray.io looks like it can handle far more advanced rules (or at least those somewhat comparable to procmail, and without having to do a bunch of manual scripting!), but in a more user-friendly, graphical way. And if it can automatically generate machine-learned rule suggestions based on user behavior, that would be even more fantastic.
The only major downside is that you have to be willing to let a third-party have access to your e-mail (and I know that when I've written server-side procmail scripts that have misbehaved, I've managed to unintentionally lose e-mail at least once or twice in my lifetime; of course, I didn't know that I had even lost the mail, since the server silently discarded it due to my malformed rules).
How does the authentication work with email providers? Does the application access email through POP or IMAP? Does it have arbitrary access to my email account?
I fear I'll never benefit from apps like this as my email account is the skeleton key to my online identity. I'm not sure I could trust any other human being with the password.
At the moment the private alpha is just Gmail, because gmail provides OAuth Authentication, a much more secure/elegant way than requesting a users IMAP credentials.
Work is being done on supporting other email providers, which will obviously require storing the users credentials in a secure way & there is also a white label/internally hosted version in the works for the enterprise that mmahemoff mentioned..
Security for email is definitely our biggest issue so far, but we want to make sure we have it nailed before we go public...
I'm not sure how they compare, but a friend of mine's company does something similar: http://www.awayfind.com
They provide similar filters and suggest filters from your communication behavior. E.g., you consistently respond to Peter Norvig quickly, perhaps you want an alert.
I'm I the only person who is reluctant to add a service hosted by a startup to your email process? What kind of plans do you have for when they close/exit/pivot/whatever were calling it these days? How is this not going to be another Sparrow or Fluent?
I'm I the only person who is reluctant to add a service hosted by a startup to your email process?
No, you're not.
When I'm choosing businesses to work with, one of the first things I consider is longevity. Of course there's always a possibility that another business will close down after you start working with them, but there's not much point building a relationship with a business if you actively expect that to happen in the near future.
I think this is something that a certain part of the start-up culture doesn't really take into account yet. The current popularity of acqui-hires and the obvious goal of some founders/investors to just get the company sold at the earliest possible opportunity make me very wary of dealing with small, young companies that have taken a lot of investment or were started by "serial entrepreneurs".
I suppose you go back to doing whatever you were doing before you used the service. Annoying yes, but it's not like they're hosting your mail and you have to rush to find a new host.
In this case? Hope you have a record of all your filters, then re-implement them using Python's POP or IMAP library. If they fold after demonstrating significant market interest, I'd be happy to set up a competing service with improved usability and monetization.
It's not something I'd try to launch otherwise. I'd be more about a B2B service which aims to improve issue tracking, response times, and accountability. If that does well, go on to work on knowledge retention and retrieval, which is pretty much a giant black hole you can play in forever.
Interesting. I'd love if this integrated with SpringPad (which I prefer over Evernote), either by formatting for their e-mails or preferably through their API. IFTTT does neither.
If this allowed anonymous analytics in order to discover and suggest useful rules, either at the personal level or in aggregate over all users, that would be awesome. Likewise if you can publish, clone and fork useful rules then modify them for one's account. The less a user has to come up with their own rules, the better.
And there are things that IFTTT doesn't do for e-mail that this might do. And there are API's that IFTTT doesn't support (the big one for me is springpad).
As for time sensitive, this could potentially learn what you respond to immediately upon viewing, and what you wait on or don't view, (and even analyze that as a function of day, time, sender, etc.) If it had permissions to analyze e-mail texts and had enough users, it could use machine learning to learn what phrases were likely to prompt immediate action, IE "By tomorrow morning" vs. "By Tuesday morning" on a Wednesday.
As for non Oauth accounts, A browser plugin that stored your credentials locally could still be possible. I seem to recall reading about somebody working on a clever way to do this involving passing session information using a proxy and encryption or something like that, but my memory isn't great.
Thank you - I'll get springpad on our list. We are working on analytics currently, I'd love to hear of any other API's you'd like to see hooked up please feel free to email me: rich (at) tray.io
I usually check email in the evening before going to bed. It's working marvelously since I can take an hour out of my day to handle everybody - really solves the problem of forgetting to respond to people.
The only problem are time-sensitive emails. For those I still need to periodically check my inbox to see if something urgent's come up.
If there's a way to tell Tray "If time-sensitive email, send me a tweet", that would be superbly magnificent. The landing page doesn't seem to indicate this.
Time-sensitive is so subjective that it'd be difficult to say the least if not impossible to properly implement. The only 100% guaranteed way of making sure a rule gets applied to time sensitive emails would be to train senders to add a word or code to the subject or body of the message. But again, this is based on my subjective definition of time sensitive. To me, time sensitive means someone I know sends me an email and they need a reply or at least my attention right away. That leaves out things like leads coming in from NetSuite or Salesforce (as mentioned in other replies) or automated emails that cannot be trained. It also means that I'd have to train a lot of people to do this and I may leave out some people by accident and then I'd have to train every new contact to do it on top of deciding whether or not the contact is important enough for me to allow them to send me emails that'll alert me instantly.
There's just so much to it that it seems like something only a human could do. That said, the guy from tray.io who replied with a potential solution seems to be on the right track. Its not a perfect solution but it's good enough and sometimes good enough is all you can do.
we are working with our current alpha users to find the right sort of rules that help them with their email.
The idea would be that you could setup custom rules based on the people who email you, or other web services you use, for example if a hot lead in sales force emailed you while your in a meeting, then forward it via SMS.
Being able to pickout a "time sensistive" email would really depend on what you consider time sensitive, but im sure we could provide something that would help.. email dom at tray.io and we can talk more about how tray could help fix your issue..?
What is the typical number of rules someone has to write if they get, say, 100 emails per day from any combination of 1000 contacts?
If you have 100 common contacts (as opposed to the other 900 who email once and a while) and I need, say, a rule or two for each to cover the basics... and a rule or two to cover groups of people (because one-to-one emails are the exception in business not the rule)... isn't that hundreds and hundreds of rules?
Not having seen the alpha, that feels like an insurmountable first threshold, UX-wise.
Also, just out of curiosity, other than general ease-of-use (which seems much nicer in your 3 examples), how is this better than typical filters (which I don't use)?
It really depends on how you manage your inbox, one of the drivers behind us building Tray was the customisation it offers. The triggers that define the rules can cover as many or as few contacts as you wish ie 'anyone I have a meeting with in the next 48 hrs' can be a trigger, or simply based on email content, pre-defined contact groups etc. In most cases this is a handful of rules.
Email rules that are setup within the client or service restrict filtering to contact, folder, content (in some cases). We can react to data that's outside of your inbox, anything from your relationship to the contact based on another web service, to accessing, storing, and sharing with services you use regularly. Beyond this triggers such as time, email load (driven from analytics), location can all come into play. We are really just getting started with the possibilities, a way to interact with custom web apps would be great for developers/companies that use bespoke tools.
+1 on this, I probably haven't used Tray to the full potential but the simple features such as putting all attachments into Dropbox and sending me an SMS for server test notifications.
This probably sounds negative but isn't this just adding needless complexity to something that's simple? I've tried rules in mail clients before, but in the end the best filter is myself scanning the from and subject columns.
This may be overkill for some people, but if everyone could just easily scan from and subject columns then there wouldn't be a global email epidemic that lots of people are trying to solve. Tray is trying to allow you to define how you use your inbox, rather than assuming that your like the next 100 people...
Really great idea, integration to non-oauth email providers seems like a hurdle though. Requiring full credentials is a less good idea.
If they add post-read-filtering of the inbox it would handle some sorting after the work is finished as well. For example, filter all mail from X flagged with label done to that customers folder.
Using ActiveSync to access Exchange would probably be the best way to pull it off (though there are probably patent-related concerns). A lot of Exchange admins aren't going to like opening up IMAP, but nearly every Exchange installation today has ActiveSync enabled and exposed to the Internet.
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
I was recently asking people for a way to translate emails into SMSs, so I could route my system alerts (from various places) to a single email and ensure I always get by SMS. It's a surprisingly hard problem right now, which Tray looks like it would solve elegantly if they get SMS right.
[+] [-] bryanh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barik|13 years ago|reply
But tray.io looks like it can handle far more advanced rules (or at least those somewhat comparable to procmail, and without having to do a bunch of manual scripting!), but in a more user-friendly, graphical way. And if it can automatically generate machine-learned rule suggestions based on user behavior, that would be even more fantastic.
The only major downside is that you have to be willing to let a third-party have access to your e-mail (and I know that when I've written server-side procmail scripts that have misbehaved, I've managed to unintentionally lose e-mail at least once or twice in my lifetime; of course, I didn't know that I had even lost the mail, since the server silently discarded it due to my malformed rules).
[0] http://www.procmail.org/ [1] http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve
[+] [-] d0de|13 years ago|reply
I fear I'll never benefit from apps like this as my email account is the skeleton key to my online identity. I'm not sure I could trust any other human being with the password.
[+] [-] adotify|13 years ago|reply
Work is being done on supporting other email providers, which will obviously require storing the users credentials in a secure way & there is also a white label/internally hosted version in the works for the enterprise that mmahemoff mentioned..
Security for email is definitely our biggest issue so far, but we want to make sure we have it nailed before we go public...
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattrepl|13 years ago|reply
They provide similar filters and suggest filters from your communication behavior. E.g., you consistently respond to Peter Norvig quickly, perhaps you want an alert.
[+] [-] wwkeyboard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|13 years ago|reply
No, you're not.
When I'm choosing businesses to work with, one of the first things I consider is longevity. Of course there's always a possibility that another business will close down after you start working with them, but there's not much point building a relationship with a business if you actively expect that to happen in the near future.
I think this is something that a certain part of the start-up culture doesn't really take into account yet. The current popularity of acqui-hires and the obvious goal of some founders/investors to just get the company sold at the earliest possible opportunity make me very wary of dealing with small, young companies that have taken a lot of investment or were started by "serial entrepreneurs".
[+] [-] xtdx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grueful|13 years ago|reply
It's not something I'd try to launch otherwise. I'd be more about a B2B service which aims to improve issue tracking, response times, and accountability. If that does well, go on to work on knowledge retention and retrieval, which is pretty much a giant black hole you can play in forever.
[+] [-] mcrittenden|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsiebert|13 years ago|reply
If this allowed anonymous analytics in order to discover and suggest useful rules, either at the personal level or in aggregate over all users, that would be awesome. Likewise if you can publish, clone and fork useful rules then modify them for one's account. The less a user has to come up with their own rules, the better.
And there are things that IFTTT doesn't do for e-mail that this might do. And there are API's that IFTTT doesn't support (the big one for me is springpad).
As for time sensitive, this could potentially learn what you respond to immediately upon viewing, and what you wait on or don't view, (and even analyze that as a function of day, time, sender, etc.) If it had permissions to analyze e-mail texts and had enough users, it could use machine learning to learn what phrases were likely to prompt immediate action, IE "By tomorrow morning" vs. "By Tuesday morning" on a Wednesday.
As for non Oauth accounts, A browser plugin that stored your credentials locally could still be possible. I seem to recall reading about somebody working on a clever way to do this involving passing session information using a proxy and encryption or something like that, but my memory isn't great.
All in all, I wish them luck.
[+] [-] waldr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|13 years ago|reply
The only problem are time-sensitive emails. For those I still need to periodically check my inbox to see if something urgent's come up.
If there's a way to tell Tray "If time-sensitive email, send me a tweet", that would be superbly magnificent. The landing page doesn't seem to indicate this.
[+] [-] bpatrianakos|13 years ago|reply
There's just so much to it that it seems like something only a human could do. That said, the guy from tray.io who replied with a potential solution seems to be on the right track. Its not a perfect solution but it's good enough and sometimes good enough is all you can do.
[+] [-] adotify|13 years ago|reply
The idea would be that you could setup custom rules based on the people who email you, or other web services you use, for example if a hot lead in sales force emailed you while your in a meeting, then forward it via SMS.
Being able to pickout a "time sensistive" email would really depend on what you consider time sensitive, but im sure we could provide something that would help.. email dom at tray.io and we can talk more about how tray could help fix your issue..?
[+] [-] 16s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moe|13 years ago|reply
4th party. Most of their target audience is probably on GMail and has no privacy concerns to begin with.
[+] [-] JoelMarsh|13 years ago|reply
If you have 100 common contacts (as opposed to the other 900 who email once and a while) and I need, say, a rule or two for each to cover the basics... and a rule or two to cover groups of people (because one-to-one emails are the exception in business not the rule)... isn't that hundreds and hundreds of rules?
Not having seen the alpha, that feels like an insurmountable first threshold, UX-wise.
Also, just out of curiosity, other than general ease-of-use (which seems much nicer in your 3 examples), how is this better than typical filters (which I don't use)?
[+] [-] waldr|13 years ago|reply
Email rules that are setup within the client or service restrict filtering to contact, folder, content (in some cases). We can react to data that's outside of your inbox, anything from your relationship to the contact based on another web service, to accessing, storing, and sharing with services you use regularly. Beyond this triggers such as time, email load (driven from analytics), location can all come into play. We are really just getting started with the possibilities, a way to interact with custom web apps would be great for developers/companies that use bespoke tools.
[+] [-] eranation|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waldr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twitchhiker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkmcknz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FusionX|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukedeering|13 years ago|reply
Check it out! During the interview Dom talks about startingup, their pivot and shares advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Job lads!
[+] [-] damian2000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] domlewis1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdbradford|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwaroopH|13 years ago|reply
Tray is awesome. Met these guys in London on their demo through our accelerator exchange program.
[+] [-] perssontm|13 years ago|reply
If they add post-read-filtering of the inbox it would handle some sorting after the work is finished as well. For example, filter all mail from X flagged with label done to that customers folder.
[+] [-] ihavebeenseen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adparadox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|13 years ago|reply
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