Show HN: Turn an email to a web page

by mailpin • 12 years ago

197 74 12 years ago

stanmancan• 12 years ago

This is a neat idea. It would be cool to somehow allow you to add a list of recipients that should receive the link once it's pinned, but I guess that takes away from the simplicity of it.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

That seems in line with the design more so than uploading css or js.

hngiszmo3• 12 years ago

like if you receive a mail that was not only to p@mailp.in, you could send the generated link to those people in CC.

I'm not sure what to use this for though. Who would look at the website when it just contains what was in the mail a minute ago anyway?

scoj2• 12 years ago

I like the idea. I can't think of a specific use-case for me yet, but email integrated apps are often pretty cool and make for easier adoption.

mailpin14• 12 years ago

We (as developers of mailpin) use the services ourselves:

1. Ad hoc image album. Put a bunch of images as attachments in an email and send to p@mailp.in to create a simple page.

2. Forward company receipts to p@mailp.in and create a page, and share the link in coworkers ... (this sounds weird ... but it works well for us ...)

3. Forward marketing spams to create page, and publicly share such pages to denounce those spammers :)

4. Forward paper acceptance latters or other letters to create pages, and share them to show off -- vanity!

5. Ad hoc blogging ... Don't want to have an account, don't want people to follow me. But occasionally, we still want to say something and share to Friends that we really trust.

6. Create a playlist of youtube videos. Put a bunch of youtube links and send to p@mailp.in. A page with embedded videos will be created. We don't have youtube accounts ... sorry ... but still want to share a bunch of videos with friends ...

7. Tweet more than 140 characters. Create a page with short url, and tweet!

There would be more use cases. The point is, we want something dead simple. No registration, no app (well, email client is still needed ...), and private.

scoj2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the update of what went through your minds. Keep track of how customers use it. You will likely be surprised by what actually is done with it.

roryhughes• 12 years ago

It would be handy if you could attach a js or css file to the email which would be used in the published page.

gnicholas2• 12 years ago

This is an excellent idea—I've received many requests from people who want to be able to use the BeeLine Reader browser plugins to read their email. This would accomplish that goal. Even without a JS/CSS helper, this is still really awesome because people can use this tool in combination with our browser plugins. Please contact me (nick@BeeLineReader.com) if you end up allowing JS/CSS helpers so that we can work with you to make ours compatible. Thanks again for this awesome product!

umurkontaci2• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, you have written a very similar message to the comments section of the given link. It smells spam.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

Thread.is tried to do this a couple years ago. Gone now. Not sure there's a good use case for it.

Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20121118205935/https://beta.threa...

Twitter: https://twitter.com/threadhq

prawn• 12 years ago

I used Posterous a fair bit to do blogging by email when abroad. Attach photos from my phone and it auto-created a gallery. Saved a lot of time.

paulgb• 12 years ago

Ditto. The best part was that offline "just worked": I could compose the post in GMail and it would send once I had a signal.

zavi• 12 years ago

This is great. One use case: my grandma who struggled to learn how to use email can now make websites.

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks! Our goal is to keep it simple. It's just like many things in life, it's always harder to decide what not to do than deciding what to do.

daviding2• 12 years ago

Nicely done. Feedback:

- Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that.

- A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font.

- You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names).

- I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks for your feedback!

"Where's your privacy policy detailed? With the nature of the service (gathering email addresses etc) you could head-off lots of questions with that."

We haven't worked out a formal privacy policy ... but of course, user privacy is our top priority! We won't use user emails for anything else. In fact, from the post page, you can't find your email address.

"A default serif font drags anything down. For me personally I'd prefer another font."

We are still improving on the UI ... We would appreciate if you tell us your preferred font :)

"You sensibly replace emails, but other links like 'unsubscribe' remain intact, which could be problematic (don't worry, you'll still get your costco emails although it can sometimes lead to real emails/names)"

We also take care of unsubscribe part if the unsubscribe url contains your email address.

"I guess grouping and parsing is the next step, i.e. process them and provide features around them a la tripit. Is that the direction you might take it?"

Definitely there are many possibilities to explore from what we have right now. We'd like to hear users comments / critiques / suggestions first.

daviding2• 12 years ago

Just to clarify what I meant by the 'unsubscribe' part, many newsletters (like your Costco example from the OP) contain an unsubscribe link without an email but with a unique id in the href. When clicking this you often get to a page that then lets you unsubscribe and sometimes also see who the address was subscribed too, which defeats the purpose. I'm not sure what would be the ideal solution, but you could hit it with a hammer and remove all hrefs from the content in the email DOM, or perhaps parse explicitly for unsubscribe links (harder, as they vary, a bit of NLP etc). Alternatively, just consider the page as 'not for hostiles', in that the user should only share with people who wouldn't hunt for mischief in the first place.

For next steps and parsing, it really depends on if you want to store a user graph your end, i.e. do you want to also initiate the 'share' and know who is looking at the link? If you do then the features go in one direction (collaboration, conversations, actionable stuff) but if you don't want that then it's sort of a different animal (formatting, i.e. galleries, content suggestions and the like).

For a font, Helvetica Neue or anything in that family is all the rage ;)

zachrose• 12 years ago

Please consider keeping the default serif font. It lends an air of humble authenticity to the service, giving the impression that it's hosted by some no-BS people who want an alternative to the glossy and boring options for social media.

bussiere5• 12 years ago

Email is for me a convenient way to pass data. And client are more easy to manage or interact with emails.

And one of the best is that you can keep your data with emails an decentralised it.

Very nice works, the idea is pleasant i'am thinking on a private open source network. Would you mind if i use your idea ?

bussiere5• 12 years ago

I am thinking that it could be a way to make a extended kind of mailing list.

A maling list where you can publish things more easily ....

bussiere5• 12 years ago

And again what please me is tahat oy decentralised the things why not make comment for a post with emails too ?

Did you read this ? http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/mrprivacy.pdf

melvinmt• 12 years ago

Cool hidden feature: it obfuscates any email address mentioned in the post.

hngiszmo3• 12 years ago

slippery slope. if it obfuscates this, it implies it is meant for certain types of sharing that would also other things to get obfuscated.

pjc50• 12 years ago

I'm not clear what you mean, could you explain?

Theodores• 12 years ago

"This picture shows how we created this page:"

(Checks picture...)

Picture contains:

"This picture shows how we created this page:"

Picture of picture contains...

...there it breaks. But you were on to something recursive for a while.

chrislusf• 12 years ago

haha, interesting..., chicken and egg problem.

bambax• 12 years ago

Good! I created a similar thing last year when Posterous died; it sill exists and although it never got any traction I still use it for my blog; it's called urgeous.com and has an API that lets users use it as a service (posts can be displayed from your own domain while being hosted by Urgeous).

Your positionning is certainly superior though, because 'mail2web' is simpler and more fun than 'yet another blogging platform that uses email'...

I never got around to turning attachments on because I was afraid of the hosting costs; how do you plan on dealing with those?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks for your support!

"I never got around to turning attachments on because I was afraid of the hosting costs; how do you plan on dealing with those?"

As long as users don't delete their posts, we keep them (including attachments) there. If we are running out of storage space, we can add more machines :)

jon2512chua• 12 years ago

Are you guarding against malicious users who send automated emails containing large attachments?

mooreds• 12 years ago

Awesome! I blogged about people sending emails with content that didn't have an associated URL recently (and how that pained my heart): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1441

And mailp.in solves that issue perfectly. If someone sends you an email that is chock full of content that should be shared, just mailpin it.

One question: how long are the URL and the content preserved?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks!

"One question: how long are the URL and the content preserved?"

You decide. If you don't delete it yourself, it'll be there forever. And it's private. You decide who to share with. You decide whether to keep it or not.

We will commit to improving mailpin, making it a robust and useful service.

hashbanged• 12 years ago

What are the restrictions on attachment sizes?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

For now, we really don't have any restriction on attachment size. We accpect whatever you are allowed to send for your email account.

But definitely we have alerts and closely monitor to prevent something bad happens.

bussiere5• 12 years ago

Do you plan to implement tweeter card format for the post ?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Yes, we do.

_asciiker_• 12 years ago

Very good idea, I'll use it. just a heads up though.

Abusers will abuse, and it seems that you are only going to consider restrictions and security overall after it happens.

Set some alerts so you at least get a warning before the server goes down.

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks! Will do!

bussiere5• 12 years ago

Do you know if google index your pages ? and how it can find all the pages or links ?

mailpin14• 12 years ago

If you put your link to public places like hacker news, then google will find it.

If you simply create a post page and keep it to yourself or share in a closed social network (e.g., IM, facebook private group ...) that cannot be indexed by google, then you are good.

That said, you decide to what degree you want to share your page.

nickconfer• 12 years ago

This is not correct. With Google now having Chrome and other tools, there are many ways for Google to find out a URL exists.

You may want to send a follow up email with a quick link for the user to add a noindex meta tag to the page, or even password protect it.

tlogan• 12 years ago

Can you add so that people can append their emails / attachments to the existing page? Even SMS messages? You can add twitter message to it latter on...

ChrisNorstrom• 12 years ago

Sweet! Thank you. I just used your service apply for PIEPDX Startup Incubator just a few seconds ago. I needed a quick way to create an online photo gallery and just emailed the pics to p@mailp.in. Private by default, no account needed, and easier than min.us

bgroins• 12 years ago

Just a heads up, you left the unsubscribe active in the sample Costo email.

gphilip• 12 years ago

And the email address to which Costco sent the email is also visible.

teemonasty• 12 years ago

It must be so fun to look at the breakdown of the company or university email addresses that you are getting emails from

socrates1998• 12 years ago

This is really cool!

jqm• 12 years ago

"You email client is your editor"

Should be "Your email client...."?

techsupporter• 12 years ago

One request: PLEASE don't use highlighting-pops-up-text add-ins. They immediately get blocked on my end and are an annoying user experience.

joekrill• 12 years ago

This is a HUGE pet-peeve of mine because I have a habit of selecting text while I'm reading. And I'm definitely not alone. I don't understand why sites continue to do this.

pearjuice• 12 years ago

I don't understand why sites continue to do this.

The same reason they show advertisements. By installing these plugins they get a share of affiliate income or other louchy schemes.

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Your voice is heard. We've removed the highlighting plugin. Sorry for your inconvenience.

Flolagale2• 12 years ago

Nice! We've been working on a similar project http://jokund.com You just send an email and any Cc'ed people is subscribed to your blog. Would love some feedback. By the way, we also open sourced an npm module to handle inbound emails and post them to a webhook of your choice https://github.com/Flolagale/mailin

shutton• 12 years ago

Looks really good, very nice design.

Flolagale2• 12 years ago

Thanks! Feel free to use it and share any other comments or remarks!

INTPenis• 12 years ago

Does anyone know which library this uses to convert mails to HTML?

I'm wondering because I need something for a devops project that can show spam inline in a webpage. Obviously this is dangerous because it could spread malware so what could mailp.in be using to avoid spreading malware like this?

stevekemp• 12 years ago

I'd be curious what your approach is to handling porn submissions, be they legal or not? (i.e. I don't see anything about reporting illegal images, like most gallery-hosting sites have.)

Also how will you handle spam? Just post it regardless unless or until volume becomes excessive?

yitchelle• 12 years ago

Great Idea. Can you add a time limit functions on the generated webpage? The generated webpage will be deleted after x number of days.

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

So I tested this with https://emailprivacytester.com/. I didn't get an automated response with a link. However, I noticed that somebody had viewed the email using an iPhone. So I scanned my logs to grab the referer from the callbacks and it was:

http://mailp.in/dashboard/reply/*ID*

Where I replaced the actual id with "ID". So I copied the ID from that referrer and visited:

http://mailp.in/*ID*

It seems you don't strip out quite a lot of stuff, including script tags and meta refresh tags.

If you want to contact me about any of this, my details are at https://grepular.com/#contact (I am the author of https://emailprivacytester.com/ if you hadn't guessed)

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks for your testing! We have fixed the script / meta tag strip problem. We keep improving our code base, making sure emails are rendered correctly on web pages. We won't use user data for anything else.

milkers• 12 years ago

I want to see the mailp.inception on the image attached!

ssivark• 12 years ago

Cool stuff! :-)

Feedback:

"The created web page is private to you."

If I understand the system correctly, isn't that misleading? Once you share the link with someone, they could share it with the whole world. I.e. you share full control with every person you share the link with. Kinda like the privacy you get with email (no more) so maybe @mailpin could correct the description to reflect that.

funkyy• 12 years ago

Imgur says exactly the same - your Images are private and its up to you if share them. I cannot imagine situation where someone shares a link and expect the content to be private any more...

bdirgo• 12 years ago

I know not logging in is the basic premise of your website, but I'd also like to be able to read more than just the one post I found written by that author. Rather than search his tweets, and facebook posts, and any emails he's ever sent me for a mailp.in link.

Is there a way you can have sub-domains such as [username].mailp.in/[post address]

Perhaps the username is a hash of the email address to keep the privacy of the user. Not a deal-breaker but it'd be nice.

sudheendrach• 12 years ago

This is bad https://www.google.co.in/search?q=site%3Amailp.in

mailpin14• 12 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out. All these google indexes are gone.

rpgmaker• 12 years ago

This passed the instapaper test, thanks!

Show HN: Turn an email to a web page

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