Show HN: Signal – Edit emails in your Gmail inbox

https://trysignal.com

by gsundeep • 13 years ago

151 88 13 years ago

trysignal.com

chunky1994• 13 years ago

Cool concept, lets see where it'll go!

canistr2• 13 years ago

I like the idea of re-naming these as a form of mini-notes.

But now that Gmail is getting into providing context for emails (such as flight check-ins), I'd like it if the auto-generated emails could also learn based on summaries I provide. Kind of like a filter rule based on what I've done in the past to re-name the email to what I'm looking for.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

This is such a great idea. Like if you could somehow turn the massive emails chocked full of garbage from airlines into something that just says:

  MCO > JFK 9/18 1:00 PM EFZG94

finnh• 13 years ago

... and that's why i use tripit

jedberg• 13 years ago

Tripit has saved me so much time (and helped my marriage too) by solving this problem. I just started using it this summer when I was doing a lot of international travel.

Now, I just forward the email to tripit and I have an item in my calendar (that is shared with my wife) that has just the relevant info (flight time, number, conf #, etc) so I can see it any time and so can she.

No more looking at those awful emails (which I just archive as soon as I forward it).

phalanx1013• 13 years ago

I love this idea. I'd love it even more if they had an API and I could pull my todo list into my terminal.

kartikt10• 13 years ago

One of our goals is to present you the same information on your phones so having the API is definitely part of the plan!

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

This is where we see Signal moving forward - automatically summarizing emails based on your previous editing patterns.

canistr2• 13 years ago

I was thinking of filter controls a la gmail style where I can automatically put things into folders or archive/whatever. More control directly in the hands of the user but still allowing your algorithms to do the heavy lifting.

mdork• 13 years ago

awesome! def like what i see so far!

jtth• 13 years ago

Now you have two problems.

kirbyk2• 13 years ago

2 problems?

phalanx1013• 13 years ago

99 problems, son

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

I love the idea, but I'm guessing that this extension stores your edits on the local machine you're using at the time?

I jump from computer to computer and something like this would only really be helpful for me if my edits followed me around. Possible?

glifchits• 13 years ago

Probably already a thing with Chrome sync?

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

Actually, your edits are synced across all your computers where Signal is installed.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

What data store are you using then?

drags• 13 years ago

Why does it need to access my data on all websites? Shouldn't it only need access to mail.google.com?

Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

Good catch - we're updating the extension manifest file to limit permissions. Thanks!

Tyrant505• 13 years ago

This turns me off to almost every extension I am curious in trying out.

kartikt10• 13 years ago

We just updated the extension and fixed those permissions. The changes should take place in the next hour!

taylorbuley• 13 years ago

Lack of priority inbox support is a deal killer for me.

Is usage of Prio Inbox not common?

kartikt10• 13 years ago

Hey Taylor, we are constantly adding features and fixes to Signal. When we say that priority inbox isn't supported, we only refer to the edits being reflected on the inbox screen. The interface works like normal on the email itself. The preview features for priority inbox should be up in the next few days!

kirbyk2• 13 years ago

If you guys are storing this data in Firebase, then the next logical step is a native mobile app, likely iOS. What's the timeframe for such?

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

The iOS app is already in development, we're planning to launch it before January.

phalanx1013• 13 years ago

Any plans for a Windows Phone app? I could see an idea like this doing really well on a platform designed for productive people.

oliversong• 13 years ago

Messes with keyboard shortcut workflow :(

kartikt10• 13 years ago

We tried experimenting with having it always be on auto-edit mode (assumed most people don't heavily rely on shortcuts) so we definitely understand that this will interrupt your flow as a power gmail user. We will be pushing the feature to disable auto-edit in the next few days and I'd be more than happy to comment here when it's out :)

agrona• 13 years ago

Please do. I was hoping to find an option to turn it off.

robertnealan• 13 years ago

As an initial concept it's interesting but not very useful for most people in it's current state as it ultimately requires me to spend more time in my inbox. I think the real potential is in your "Coming Soon" feature, where it will hopefully be able to automatically figure out the best subject lines for me and save me time in the long run. Ultimately, it'd be great if it could decipher whether or not the email can be answered with a simple answer (yes/no, a time/date, etc), and provide the buttons to respond to it without ever actually opening up the email itself.

As far as the site itself goes - it has a clean, simple to understand interface lacks anything sexy to sell the idea. The animation is a great idea, but just seems dry and lacks context. Looking at the "Using Signal" page (https://trysignal.com/using-signal/), I'd say use a screenshot similar to the one there (albeit with the full inbox visible), and show an animation of the email being edited in real time rather than the side by side comparison. That would be a much clearer demonstration and immediately provide the context as to what's happening. In all reality you could just integrate the "Using Signal" page into the main index for the moment as it doesn't have enough information to really constitute a secondary page.

kartikt10• 13 years ago

The button concept you describe is very interesting - we have been playing around with NLP for extracting actionable items from email, but we want to make sure it’s accurate before we launch any features that rely on it. Thanks for the feedback on the website, we’re definitely be changing it up in the coming weeks.

udfalkso• 13 years ago

Is the original email accessible somewhere after I create my edited version?

kartikt10• 13 years ago

Of course! Once you edit the email you can click on the 'Restore' button (visible inside the email) to display the original and toggle to your changes again by clicking 'Revert'

bru• 13 years ago

Having it show on hover could be convenient I think.

jonperl• 13 years ago

Great application!

One bug I noticed is that when I mark a message as unread, the subject line / summary text goes back to what it used to be.

Maybe you guys could have an empty repo on GitHub to keep track of bugs?

kartikt10• 13 years ago

Excellent idea! We just created one: https://github.com/TrySignal/Support

ape4• 13 years ago

I do this with Thunderbird (IMAP access to gmail) and the Header Tools Lite plugin. Works for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-to...

aroman• 13 years ago

This is a fantastic concept, but I will never use it because I don't use Chrome and I don't like the idea of my inbox being different on each device I use.

I'll just wait for Google to either ripoff the idea or (hopefully) acquihire the company and integrate it into Gmail itself.

Really the idea that the message preview is the FIRST two lines is comically absurd, especially for a company like Google. It's actually amazing to me nobody has done this yet.

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

We're actually testing Signal on Safari/FF as the majority of the codebase is the same. They should be out in the coming weeks.

pieterhg• 13 years ago

I like this a lot but moving back from message to inbox now takes an extra second with the extension enabled.

kartikt10• 13 years ago

Thanks for reporting this. We are already working on adding a fix to this. It should be handled in the next few days

nemothekid• 13 years ago

Unrelated - pretty surreal to see my relatively small hometown used in an example.

lwf• 13 years ago

Classy address in the MailChimp email, but I'm not sure this is CAN-SPAM compliant:

  Signal
  Starbucks
  San Francisco, CA 94100

mrcactu5• 13 years ago

This is a good start. I am hesistant to share my Gmail info with any app.

on the other hand Gmail itself (as in the client) is clearly reading my mail

rcthompson• 13 years ago

What is this actually doing? I.e. are the emails being edited on the server or is the extension storing a set of edits and applying them when you view the edited emails in Gmail in Chrome? Are the original emails still accessible? How?

readme• 13 years ago

OP, please deliver. It is super important to me that the original emails are preserved somewhere. Is this so?

brownBananas2• 13 years ago

Not OP, but to answer your question - yes, the original emails are preserved. More info: https://trysignal.com/using-signal/

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

We are storing the changes you make to an email and then loading those changes back in when you view that email. The original email is never deleted, you can always click the "Restore" button get back to the original.

btn• 13 years ago

Storing them where?

Avalaxy• 13 years ago

Strange. When I open gmail, I have to give permission. I do that, dismiss the dialog, the page refreshes, and I get the same dialog. Over and over again, I think I've given the app my permission like 10 times. And the buttons aren't appearing in my gmail.

What am I doing wrong?

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

Hi there - if you're willing to help us debug your issue, shoot us an email at team@trysignal.com and we'll send you some instructions to get that sorted out asap.

coherentpony2• 13 years ago

It's not immediately clear to me what problem this is solving.

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

A lot of people use their inbox as their todo list, but there's a lot of noise in their emails that they have to parse through every time they check their inbox.

Signal currently allows you to edit the emails in your inbox so you can get rid of irrelevant info (or even add info) as you see fit. We're experimenting with auto summarization (check out the website for an example).

The goal is to make the inbox a better to-do list.

coherentpony2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I've used it before. It's pretty cool. I wish the equation stuff was a little more flexible.

dan-g• 13 years ago

I may have missed this, but do you offer any sort of revision control? Don't want to accidentally delete something important.

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

We don't have any kind of version control, but we do allow you to flip back and forth between the original and edited emails.

We never delete the original copy of the email so you'll never have to worry about accidentally deleting important content.

k_bx2• 13 years ago

Offtopic: the feature I lack is to permanently add some info (like tags) so that email is searchable by some keywords, but I guess that's harder to make (and should be done on gmail side).

stevenae• 13 years ago

Does Gmail labels fall short of your need?

k_bx2• 13 years ago

I don't think so. Maybe if I'd need it much more, I could somehow come up with greasemonkeying UI to use labels for this, but currently I think labels are more like folders.

benatkin• 13 years ago

This is not seamless. I don't need to try it to find that out, I just have seen this type of extension enough times to know that it isn't seamless, especially in beta form.

brownBananas2• 13 years ago

Seamless in which sense? Across different devices, mail services, accounts, etc?

tnorthcutt• 13 years ago

Seems to open emails in "editing" mode by default. I filed an issue on Github.

gsundeep14• 13 years ago

Thanks for doing so - we're adding a settings pane where you can turn off the auto-edit functionality. I'll update the gh issue once it's live.

Imagenuity• 13 years ago

This is the one thing that has kept me from completely switching to Gmail. However, since these edits are not actually written back to the email, but stored locally (even synced with Signal on other machines), it does no good since the Gmail app on my Android phone and tablet can't see the changes. BE VERY CLEAR you're just editing and storing locally. The original Gmail message unchanged. I combined two emails, deleted one of them, and checked it in the Gmail app. All I see is the original message, but other other is deleted. This will just confuse most people. Unless this can change the message on Gmail, it is useless to me.

aleem• 13 years ago

I'll share an even better approach that works across all devices, allows better todo management and allows you to preserve the original email context.

The first thing you need to know is that an email sent to username+anything@gmail.com is the same as sending it to username@gmail.com. Knowing that you can send all your notes to username+todo@gmail.com and then create a filter to attach a Yellow "TODO" label for any such emails received. You can send yourself reminders from anywhere. You may want to add your "todo" in your address book for convenience.

You can also reply to any email that needs attention and change the recipient to username+todo@gmail.com. If you add a short summary in the first line of the body, it will show in your inbox preview. That email will sit in your inbox vying for your attention and when you open it, you can always refer to the original thread. It's also possible to expand this idea further. For example, you can reply to an existing todo email and add more details. You can also keep a draft email within the same thread where you have rough notes. I have drafts that are a year old attached to todo items. You can mark items complete fairly easily as well. You should have GMail keyboard shortcuts enabled if you don't already.

On a related note, you can also sync your iPhone notes to keep them on GMail. That works out nicely as you always have them backed up online and you can have read-only access to them from anywhere through your GMail account.

I haven't needed anything more for my todo management.

pain_perdu• 13 years ago

There is a HUGE branding problem here.

A few weeks ago, Hubspot launched their gmail add-on product called Signals.

Now this company has launched their gmail add-on product called Signal.

The products are way too similar to avoid user confusion.

See http://www.getsignals.com/ vs https://trysignal.com/

ck2• 13 years ago

Find a way to give back the old compose message box, charge $1 to buy the feature and you'll be a millionaire in a week.

ozh• 13 years ago

I approve this message. Damn you, compose.

swah• 13 years ago

Have you tried Shift + Click on the compose button? I don't remember if that is the same, but its already better.

Beltiras• 13 years ago

Yeah, just what I need. More American corporations with access to my data ......

shishir1• 13 years ago

It expands the first conversation for an email conversation. This change in default settings (Gmail by default expands the latest message) is very painful! I un-installed it after 1 hour of usage...

namanbharadwaj• 13 years ago

This interferes with my GMail keyboard shortcuts (presumably because editing mode is on by default when I open an email). There should be some kind of option to make editing mode off by default.

Or am I missing something?

hansbbans• 13 years ago

is there anyone to set the default mode to edit as opposed to have it default to editing?

brads842• 13 years ago

Off Topic: How do you guys make that awesome gif video on the homepage without making the file size too large?

brads842• 13 years ago

NM, isn't a gif after all.

Show HN: Signal – Edit emails in your Gmail inbox

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