Show HN: Rebump – Bump Important Emails Until They're Answered

http://rebump.cc

by ezrameanshelp • 12 years ago

33 48 12 years ago

rebump.cc

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

This is a tool we built to use internally and are spinning off. We did the same with InVision App a while back.

Rebump works with Gmail on Chrome/Firefox for now.

Feedback treasured.

matt_vera2• 12 years ago

It looks simple and valuable, which is good, but I feel my needs are already more than met with Boomerang for Gmail.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

Boomerang is awesome. And it will tell you when an email hasn't been replied to.

But it won't automatically bump until you get a response. We think Rebump saves time and workflow that way. It plays very nicely with both Boomerang and YesWare.

lutusp8• 12 years ago

Quote: "Rebump sends multiple follow-up messages to your email recipients for you. These automated emails are customized to appear as if you sent the email yourself."

Wow -- they managed not to use the word "spam" anywhere on their site.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

It would be silly for spammers to use this. It would just increase the likelihood of them being marked as spam by people that already ignored their first try.

This is for people who you expect an answer from but the email has fallen through the cracks. Maybe it's starred, maybe they opened it on mobile and forgot to save as new. Your concern is definitely one we are keeping an eye out for but haven't seen it yet.

lutusp8• 12 years ago

It would be silly for spammers to use this. It would just increase the likelihood of them being marked as spam by people that already ignored their first try.

Not if the spammers use a botnet to change the email's source for each retry. Anyone who thinks spam originates from a fixed server name and IP is living in the past. More here:

http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/antispam.html

http://www.arachnoid.com/anti_spam/pic2_crop_small_trans.gif

Also, an easy way for a legitimate sender to be redefined as a spammer is for them to send copies of an e-mail until they get a reply.

Your concern is definitely one we are keeping an eye out for but haven't seen it yet.

Like Bitcoin thefts, you won't see any sign of it until it's too late.

This idea violates the most basic civilized e-mail rule -- if you don't get a reply, don't badger the recipient. Spammers, of course, don't care about civilized behavior and will find this idea very appealing.

JTon• 12 years ago

From the video: > You can easily monitor the status of each message you send and know if and when it gets read

Huh? How?

fxthea• 12 years ago

Maybe pixels are placed in the emails?

matt_vera2• 12 years ago

Most likely yes. Same as how Sendgrid and Yesware do it.

lutusp8• 12 years ago

There are a number of reliable ways to detect a read. The most common is to sent an HTML-format message with an embedded graphic link to the sender's server.

manuelflara• 12 years ago

That's not reliable enough. A lot of email clients (or users) have images off by default, at least when reading emails from new senders.

mariusz79• 12 years ago

Try it with my Mutt:)

chacham15• 12 years ago

Note: this will not work if the person you are emailing is using gmail because gmail caches (and changes the address of) all images in the email so it appears that the image was opened immediately.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

Seems to me that that can, in principle, produce both false negatives (images turned off in client) and false positives (if a client were to parse HTML-format message and retrieve embedded graphics autonomously before the user actually displayed the message for reading).

Even ignoring the fact that "my client has displayed the message, including any embedded images" is not equivalent to "I have read the message" (which is especially a factor in clients with a preview pane, where simply being the most recent message when the client is opened may result in the former condition, but quite often not the latter if the user is opening the client to send a message or look for a particular message.)

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

This is a future feature and we are examining which method is best and whether people actually want it. Would you adjust the content of a bump based on whether or not the person has viewed the email? May cross the Creepy Line. Maybe not. Open to feedback.

uladzislau• 12 years ago

Looks cool and I'd like to try it. A few questions for you:

How does it work technically? Is the same first message sent every time? What is the feedback from people who are being "rebumped"?

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

You can adjust the message and how frequently you want the bumps to happen. The people being bumped think it's you and they respond to the original email.

nuxi7• 12 years ago

Except its glaringly obvious that the original sender didn't send the new email.

Notably, your emails are HTML only.

chrisfarms• 12 years ago

Dear Busy Person,

I know you get so many emails that it takes you a while to reply, so I thought I'd help you out by sending you more emails.

Regards.

Rebump.

------

Jest aside, nagging does work, so this technique probably would too, but I can imagine if someone started using it on me, it'd just filter the messages to the bin.

The product does look very well executed. Best of luck.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

You don't reply to an email and you get a reply a few days later: "Hey, I just wanted to make sure that you saw this. If you need any more details, just let me know. Thanks again!"

If you did mean to reply to that first email, this gets the job done. You can also customize the message to whatever you want. Even: "bump!"

lutusp8• 12 years ago

It's a new name for spam. Renaming things has limited potential to change how we think about them.

jeremysmyth• 12 years ago

(I agree with everything you say but wanted to comment on a tiny three word snippet of your comment :) )

Nagging works if the person you're nagging has forgotten about you and if they hold you in high enough priority in the first place.

However, if you mail someone competent and organized, and they deliberately shelve you because you are not as important to them as other things they're doing, they'll get annoyed if you nag.

Like spam, nagging is an unpleasant intrusion on your attention. Automated nagging can't possibly improve upon that. Response expectation mismatch is a human problem with social solutions, not technical ones. If someone doesn't respond to me, I might know why, and if I don't I can restate my expectations in a manner appropriate to the relationship. Similarly, if someone requests something of me and has an expectation that I'll do it within 3 days, I can mail them to confirm receipt of the request and let them know it'll be more like 5. Expectation management in interpersonal relationships should be handled by the people involved.

Dorian-Marie• 12 years ago

As someone in the feedback chat told me:

If you want mutiple accounts, you will need to sign in with an account, then sign out (top right of https://www.rebump.cc/emails/home/), then sign in the other account, etc.

Happy bumping

wpietri2• 12 years ago

If I ever suspected a correspondent of using something like this, they would be dead to me.

I appreciate a human-generated bump now and again, because it is a signal that they continue to care about what we were talking about. But automatically sending me message after machine-generated message to prod me into doing whatever they wanted? With no effort or intervening social judgment? Fuck that.

For people to whom this appeals, I'd suggest my approach: keep a "pending" list. If you haven't heard back and still care, you can always take the 30 seconds to say, "Hey, have you had a chance to think more about this?" or whatever the contextually appropriate thing is.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

As a human asking you for a response, I think I'd deserve one to my first email. I am writing the follow-ups in advance in case you starred it and forgot it, opened it on your cell and forgot to 'save as new.' Things like that.

Also, you won't know it's machine generated, though we are considering an option to add a blurb explaining that it is a friendly reminder powered by Rebump.

Would you feel differently if that were the default?

wpietri2• 12 years ago

Thinking you deserve a quick response to every email you send is entitled bullshit. The presumption of this tool is that your time is more valuable than mine. It's insulting.

I may not know it's machine-generated the first time if you hide it well enough. But I damned well will the second or the third.

alecsmart12• 12 years ago

This may not work very well for out of organization contacts. But for inside organization contacts it works beautifully. They know youre spamming them but its like a reminder service for them (which they unfortunately wont do on their own).

Ntrails• 12 years ago

We use Lync (msn messenger) internally and if someone hasn't responded to an email I ping them on that, ring them up, or even wander over and chat depending on our relationship.

There are plenty of folks I know with 100+ unread emails this week and a bunch of them will never get seen. So imo another email isn't the most effective way to resolve it.

alecsmart12• 12 years ago

I know some might accuse you of spamming but this is extremely useful. Been using boomerang but that only remind me and then I have to manually send them an email. I hope it remains free though.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

Thanks! Its usefulness to us is why we were motivated to spin it off and release it into the wild.

jerf• 12 years ago

I tend to share the general HN opinion here. But I do feel obligated to point out that this is probably just about the most hostile environment you could possibly announce this into. Our hatred of it doesn't mean there's no market here.

...

Stupid honesty.

dalore• 12 years ago

... the more of a chance you have for a 100% response rate.

sounds like it works 100% of the time, 50% of the time.

kohanz• 12 years ago

This is probably not the site you are looking for! You attempted to reach www.rebump.cc, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as www.ohmspa.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.rebump.cc. You should not proceed, especially if you have never seen this warning before for this site.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

Yes! Many a heart skipped a beat during the period where this message was displayed, but we are back. All good. Thanks.

geminitojanus• 12 years ago

The first time I see an email from this service, they will meet my permanent blacklist.

This is absolutely, brutally intolerable. It's hard enough maintaining spam-free email without this nonsense.

ezrameanshelp16• 12 years ago

It won't be from us. It will be an email from a loved one, asking simply if you saw the email they send you a few days ago. Be gentle.

joeblau2• 12 years ago

I hope Gmail updates it spam algorithm to catch stuff like this.

Show HN: Rebump – Bump Important Emails Until They're Answered

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