17 ms·

FWD:Everyone

226 points by petethomas 8y ago

djsumdog 8y ago
I think it would be better to use reddit or hn threads; using them as an outline for a blog post. I do that manually anyway. Email would only be viable if it was a self hosted script. You're not getting access to my IMAP server. Duck that.
fdsa_asdf_666 8y ago
> We use OAuth to sync with your Gmail inbox so we’ll never ask for the password to your inbox. Fuck. No. If this is (and to be honest I didn't read it that closely) just about making a particular email public, why not just have an inbound address? submit@fwdeveryone.com I'd actually consider using a service that did that.
- omeid2 8y ago
  They want that juicy juicy inbox data. Nope. Nope. Nope.
  - hymen0ptera 8y ago
    This, just as we find out that sometimes, authorized "apps" are just proxies for mechanical turks, and people's eyes are reading your messages. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446459
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Agreed 100%. The premise of this service is already sketchy enough as-is; in light of the neverending parade of seemingly-benign "services" that eventually turn around and sell out their users to advertising agencies and the like, I have precisely zero reason to trust that FWD:Everyone will be any different in that regard.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > why not just have an inbound address? We'd love to! Unfortunately going from just the last email in the thread to being able to reconstruct the entire thread would be exceedingly difficult. Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of conversations is very important to us. If you get a permission request from our site, we want you to be 100% confident that what you see when you preview the thread is going to be what you actually wrote, and that the uploader wasn't able to change the text at all. We support making redactions and anonymizing folks, but are strongly against people being able to change the text of what they or others wrote after the fact. The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually talk with one another when they're not on stage. We're all for reducing friction, but we'd rather do it by just making a really slick Add-on so that we don't have to compromise on that core value. As for the Gmail OAuth situation, I completely agree and have been raising awareness of this on HN since long before this became a big issue the other day. You can see my tickets requesting narrower OAuth scopes here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp@gmail.com https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp...
  - omeid2 8y ago
    > Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of conversations is very important to us. Are you sure you have really tried? when you forward an email, it includes all the headers you need to for your validations.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      It only includes the headers of the last email in the thread. But that doesn't guarantee that the person forwarding the email hasn't changed what someone else wrote in the quoted reply text. To me that's actually a serious security issue, and in the long term is more serious than the OAuth thing (which I'm confident that Google will eventually fix). If I'm wrong and it's possible to do then by all means I'll do it though. The one approach that would work is building an InboxSDK plugin and having it forward every message in a thread automatically, because that way you'd have the header of each message. But then the security story is arguably much worse than OAuth.
psergeant 8y ago
I initially thought this was satire based on 3rd party apps reading your email
Alex3917 8y ago
Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but basically things that we've done since launching: - 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-post-feedback-icos-cancer https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po... - We now support oEmbed, so you can embed email directly within Reddit and Medium posts. And also within Confluence, your own site / blog, and hundreds of other places. C.f.: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_worth_traveling_to_in_the_bronx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_wor... - The site now works really well on mobile and tablet. - We've added organizations. Organizations can have public and private repositories. When publishing email to a public repository, by default permission request emails only go out to non-members of the organization. (And permission is never required to publish stuff to a private repository.) - You can now anonymize any message contributor. Anonymized message contributors don't receive permission requests. Users can later anonymize or de-anonymize themselves at any point. (This works even if message contributors haven't yet created an account.) - Threads are now SEO optimized. We basically take all the incoming garbage HTML that is modern email, and output it as really clean and minimalist HTML. (This also ensures that the redaction feature never breaks.) - We now have pretty decent video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4--bpq5LSKZ9LS44po_NUx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjI... - Users and organizations now have RSS feeds of their email, e.g.: https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex3917 https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex391... - Lots of recirc features, e.g. trending threads. New features in the pipeline: - Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment. - The front end is being completely re-written in React. Right now the front end loads in about 800ms, we're hoping to get it down to half that or less. (In comparison, the oEmbed loads in 80 - 130ms, hard to get much better without changing the speed of light.) - We're building a Gmail plug-in. This will allow people to publish directly from their Gmail, and it won't require read-only access to the user's entire inbox. (Even though our privacy policy is very good!) When we built the site we knew that no one needs or is looking for a new social network, so we figured that we aren't going to get many sign ups until people have read at least 100 really good threads on the site. We're not quite there yet, in terms of having enough content and traction for this to be a real business yet, but we're trending in the right direction and I'm hopeful we'll be close by the end of the year. But yeah, overall we're basically just trying to make the Internet fun and weird again, the way I remember it when I was a kid but with a more modern twist. And also a real business model, no BS advertising, ever. Also, for all the stuff that gets published about how addictive social networks are, try actually building one; nothing is more addictive (or inspiring) than a blank page.
owens99 8y ago
Very cool product! Will follow this and I hope it is successful.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  I sure hope they aren't. This is terrifying, from a privacy perspective.
  - owens99 8y ago
    True, but only because it is OAuth. I like the overall concept if I don't have to share access to my inbox. Better if it was via forwarding to a specific address.
    - amsheehan 8y ago
      We are actively working on a gmail add-on which would allow you to not give us access to your inbox, rather, publish single threads to the site through the gmail interface. We have a few tickets open with Google to narrow the scope of the permissions available to us for exactly that reason! :)
mirceal 8y ago
Interesting idea, but anything that wants to read my email is a big Nope.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  No OAuth is needed to make an account. For most social sites (e.g. HN), 95% of the content comes from 5% of the users. We're not trying to be any different, beyond the fact that it's also a useful business tool. Also, when our Gmail plugin gets released the OAuth story will be much better. Basically they have a scope that's read-only OAuth, but the plugin only gets access to the thread that's currently open when the user activates the plugin for that thread. That's exactly how it should work. There are still a couple features missing, we can build it without them but we're trying to work with Google to save some duplicated code on our backend.
- beager 8y ago
  Would be much easier and persuasive to the privacy-sensitive to provide an email address to send emails to and process them from there.
myrandomcomment 8y ago
Four wheel drive? WTH? Can you please offer a ..... :(
sbr464 8y ago
This is a cool concept, have to think about all the good things I may have spread across years of random PST files or gmail accounts. Hopefully at least one in there!
- amsheehan 8y ago
  One of the features we have is a naive suggestion engine. Upon signing up you can feed the app a list of keywords. These key words are used to surface relevant threads from your inbox. You can see this in action in this video: https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8 https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8
sush99 8y ago
I signed up, but I cant figure out how to delete my fweveryone account- is that not an option?
- Alex3917 8y ago
  You can use Postman or whatever to send a DELETE request to https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account with your authorization token, but it's not in the front end yet. Alternatively just send us an email and I'll delete it.
  - sush99 8y ago
    Thanks! I like the website, and probably will stick around. Was just curious about not having the delete option :)
deleted 8y ago
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meesterdude 8y ago
Really thought this was some high-brow joke - nope! This is a real product/service to share your emails. I think this is a truly terrible idea. But what do I know? google thought it was a good idea to have copies of the usernames/passwords for all the sites I visit stored on their servers. I think that's also a truly terrible idea - but they're a billion dollar company. I would never use (to share) and I am doubtful I would find any thread between two other people worthwhile. But if they can find a paying userbase, mazel tov.
deleted 8y ago
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jeswin 8y ago
Sync my inbox? So basically, if you get hacked, all my emails are public. Or at the very least, an untrusted third party (you) gets to read everyone's private email? No way I'll use it, nor allow anyone else I know to do so.
- mlatu 8y ago
  Sadly you won't have any say in the latter.
- jenscow 8y ago
  I actually thought it was a joke.
- momentmaker 8y ago
  I feel like this would be a good use case to use blockchain where the code would be public and your email messages could be encrypted.
  - ajhurliman 8y ago
    There was an IOTA "random" wallet generator where they posted the codebase online, but they had additional code on the page that made the range of generated wallets really narrow. The owner eventually robbed everyone. I'd still be skeptical.
ryan-allen 8y ago
The last time I hit reply all by accident I lost my job.
- ydushyant 8y ago
  oh, what happened?
- forbes 8y ago
  What, did you call a client a Giraffe or something?
  - ryan-allen 8y ago
    It was something like 'Giraffe', but rhymes with 'punt'.
    - oblio 8y ago
      Lesson I learned early in my career, luckily not on my own: never write something that you really don't want someone to see, especially bosses and clients and especially swearing. Mails are replied to, mails are forwarded, long chains of emails happen, your stuff gets out. A colleague at one of my first work places made fun of a client. 10-20 replies and forwards later, his mail was sent to a client. Luckily I think his message was buried too deep in the resulting mail and the client didn't see it. I did, though, as did several people from my team. We didn't say anything but we all learned a lesson that day :)
      - isostatic 8y ago
        This type of thing was always inevitable from the day top-posting became acceptable (and pretty much mandated by the email clients) Before then, you would reply to points in line and trim unneeded information. The entire conversation wasn't bolted on to be ignored by 99% of people.
        oblio 8y ago
yycom 8y ago
But what is it? "Learn more" is just videos.
- Tepix 8y ago
  It's a blank page that shows "Loading FWD:Everyone" ;-)
mychael 8y ago
It blows my mind that people are having "Group Chat" conversations like that via Email. Have they never heard of WhatsApp?
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Email is much better for longer, well thought out replies and keeping track of multiple threads of conversation, each of which may have no activity for days at a time. Whatsapp is fairly limited to quick, short replies (mostly because of interface restrictions). Even chat-like email threads have much longer messages interspersed than what you would see on WhatsApp. Email also has much better tools for finding old messages than WhatsApp
deleted 8y ago
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peter_retief 8y ago
I joined up, how do I ask for accomodation advice for a week in London in August? Do I have the right idea of the app?
- Alex3917 8y ago
  Other way around. If you have conversations in your inbox that you think would be interesting or useful to others, then you should post them! We have a suggestion engine though, so if you enter in your hobbies / interests / work projects into the relevant field on the settings page then we do a pretty good job of surfacing relevant threads. (At least as good as we can do just using metadata search, since we don't actually access anything in your inbox except the stuff you choose to upload.) But yeah we have a bunch of travel advice like that, it's definitely fun to read.
yellowapple 8y ago
I'm sorry, but the idea of a product designed specifically to facilitate the mass redistribution of communications normally assumed to be private by default is deeply disturbing. Do I need to start including EULAs in every email I send? In what multiverse is this sort of thing okay? Unless permission requests are mandatory and forever will be (regardless of anonymization), I will automatically refuse to communicate via email (and possibly any other implied-private medium, including one-to-one chats, mail, and SMS) with anyone I know to be using this service; instead, the only communications from me with these people will be through systems/services in which communications are already assumed to be public or shared (e.g. forums, mailing lists, public social media posts, blog posts / webpages, etc.). Likewise, I will never use this service myself; there are plenty of services out there that facilitate public-record written electronic communication while being upfront about it. To reiterate: my emails to others should be considered private between myself and the recipient unless both of us explicitly consent to their publication, anonymized or otherwise. That's basic fucking courtesy - courtesy which FWD:Everyone seems to be explicitly designed to violate.
- beager 8y ago
  The thing is, they could easily extract participants and require opt-in from all parties.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  It requires opt-in from all participants in the conversation, as Alex posted down this thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425 > We actually currently require double opt-in permission for each message contributor in a thread to share stuff publicly. That might change in the future, we're still playing around with the model. And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Per Alex's comment on this post (and, in fact, the current top comment): "Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment." It requires opt-in from all parties now, but there's already a publicized plan to change that. "And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose." I'm not sure how "don't worry guys, we're intentionally building a product to facilitate the wholesale violation of decades-old email etiquette and common courtesy" is supposed to make this idea sound any less horrific.
koyao 8y ago
So basically have Twitter expand its character limit and ask everyone to replace their emails with Twitter? How cool is that? :)
- heedlessly3 8y ago
  Quora and Reddit would serve essentially the same purpose for readers. That fact that it's email makes it more likely for an accidental leak of personal information.
2ion 8y ago
> * Less work than blogging, way more benefits > > * Build a community around your inbox > > * Only share the emails you intend to It's just a fancy mailing list then? Minus the SMTP leg, plus privacy/consent issues and moving to a non-free storage format as well as concentrating the presence of the "thread" at one site. The best email lore out there is saved to mailing list archives and can be linked to and shared just as easily. And mailing lists take "forwards" too.
- deleted 8y ago
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- cryptonector 8y ago
  Might as well build a tool to blogify mailing list archives. If the list is private you can always publish the blog-form summary if you have the authority to do it. But there's no way to monetize that -- you have to provide much more than that, and centralize things in the process, in order to monetize. For corporate customers who want to publish into an org, rather than the world, this service might actually be very valuable. For non-corporate uses this might make some sense, but for me... I'd not let a third party read my email.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > It's just a fancy mailing list then? It's more of a social network built around email conversations. E.g. we make it easy to not only to leave comments and share on social, but also to embed threads within any other site. Unlike email lists, we're also designed to make it easy to share great conversations after the fact, rather than having everyone copied on every message as it happens. I think one good use case for the site is sharing the best conversations from otherwise private mailing lists. (With everyone's permission, or if the list specifically allows it.) > moving to a non-free storage format If you look at the API response for our threads, it's actually much easier to parse than any archival format. That said we're not (currently) an archival product; we don't store the original raw messages, and we don't output them into archival formats designed for longterm storage. I would like to integrate with some archival products in the future though. Right now when you donate your email archives to a university, they are only readable in the reading room of the university after signing an NDA with the librarian. I think we offer a good solution for making it easy to redact some of the more interesting threads and get them on the web, and I think a lot of that stuff would be super interesting.
danielsamuels 8y ago
Recently I've been thinking about writing a service which simply has an email address you forward an email to and it makes it publicly available via a URL - useful for things like open letters etc. I'm not sure if this is the same thing, or whether I should just go ahead and make it..
tylermenezes 8y ago
I don't use Gmail. Is there a way to forward an email as the name implies, or does it only work with Gmail?
- amsheehan 8y ago
  Currently we rely on the gmail API, but it is on our roadmap to expand to the other major email providers. Is there one in particular that you would like to see on FWD:Everyone?
CaptainZeepzorp 8y ago
Ahh this is such a great idea for a website!! Hope it takes off, it would be so great to see correspondences between professors or politicians.
- amsheehan 8y ago
  Thank you! We hope so too. There's so much first hand knowledge locked up in inboxes that people would like to share.
ryboflavin8 8y ago
We used this at the editorial house I'm at to organize the editing pipeline. Super helpful when there are a bunch of people passing around different parts of a project over email. Really hope this succeeds.
vinayms 8y ago
Beyond the privacy concerns raised by others, I am not sure what this would amount to. Interesting conversations don't happen everyday, so this site might become just a collection of random email conversations that people submit that think is interesting. I am not sure if anyone wants to read them either. Further, I don't think everything is "communityfiable". Like I said earlier, interesting conversations don't happen often, so stuff like following a person due to his one email upload or whatever, recommendations etc all seem a bit too much. Following would make sense if it is someone who uploads stuff often, but in this case anyone who does it would be breaching someone else's privacy unless the uploader is part of the conversation and everyone agrees to share it. But, again, as I said earlier, interesting conversations happen only once in a while. That said, I remember how twitter was derided in the beginning as being a platform for people to share boring stuff that no one cares about, but it turned out to become something else, though not by design but only by chance, and is now quite successful.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  These things sometimes evolve in unexpected ways, and sometimes it just takes a while for people to figure out how to really use something. Use cases I think are especially compelling: - Industry leaders who get asked the same questions a lot - Professors and notable intellectuals who already give their email archives to a university when they die, and would like some of the accessible on the web. - Politicians. Their emails are already published under FOIA, but I think it would be super useful to folks campaigning also. - YouTubers, bloggers, Twitch folks, etc. And then there are dozens of business use cases also for sharing stuff internally. I’m sure there are lots of other uses beyond these though!
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acjohnson55 8y ago
I've been friends with the Alex duo for years now and I'm so impressed with how they've stuck with this core vision. Glad to see the engagement this is getting.
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226 points by petethomas 8y ago

I think it would be better to use reddit or hn threads; using them as an outline for a blog post. I do that manually anyway. Email would only be viable if it was a self hosted script. You're not getting access to my IMAP server. Duck that.

fdsa_asdf_666 8y ago

> We use OAuth to sync with your Gmail inbox so we’ll never ask for the password to your inbox. Fuck. No. If this is (and to be honest I didn't read it that closely) just about making a particular email public, why not just have an inbound address? submit@fwdeveryone.com I'd actually consider using a service that did that.

omeid2 8y ago
They want that juicy juicy inbox data. Nope. Nope. Nope.
- hymen0ptera 8y ago
  This, just as we find out that sometimes, authorized "apps" are just proxies for mechanical turks, and people's eyes are reading your messages. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446459
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Agreed 100%. The premise of this service is already sketchy enough as-is; in light of the neverending parade of seemingly-benign "services" that eventually turn around and sell out their users to advertising agencies and the like, I have precisely zero reason to trust that FWD:Everyone will be any different in that regard.
Alex3917 8y ago
> why not just have an inbound address? We'd love to! Unfortunately going from just the last email in the thread to being able to reconstruct the entire thread would be exceedingly difficult. Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of conversations is very important to us. If you get a permission request from our site, we want you to be 100% confident that what you see when you preview the thread is going to be what you actually wrote, and that the uploader wasn't able to change the text at all. We support making redactions and anonymizing folks, but are strongly against people being able to change the text of what they or others wrote after the fact. The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually talk with one another when they're not on stage. We're all for reducing friction, but we'd rather do it by just making a really slick Add-on so that we don't have to compromise on that core value. As for the Gmail OAuth situation, I completely agree and have been raising awareness of this on HN since long before this became a big issue the other day. You can see my tickets requesting narrower OAuth scopes here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp@gmail.com https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp...
- omeid2 8y ago
  > Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of conversations is very important to us. Are you sure you have really tried? when you forward an email, it includes all the headers you need to for your validations.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    It only includes the headers of the last email in the thread. But that doesn't guarantee that the person forwarding the email hasn't changed what someone else wrote in the quoted reply text. To me that's actually a serious security issue, and in the long term is more serious than the OAuth thing (which I'm confident that Google will eventually fix). If I'm wrong and it's possible to do then by all means I'll do it though. The one approach that would work is building an InboxSDK plugin and having it forward every message in a thread automatically, because that way you'd have the header of each message. But then the security story is arguably much worse than OAuth.

psergeant 8y ago

I initially thought this was satire based on 3rd party apps reading your email

Alex3917 8y ago

Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but basically things that we've done since launching: - 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-post-feedback-icos-cancer https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-po... - We now support oEmbed, so you can embed email directly within Reddit and Medium posts. And also within Confluence, your own site / blog, and hundreds of other places. C.f.: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_worth_traveling_to_in_the_bronx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_wor... - The site now works really well on mobile and tablet. - We've added organizations. Organizations can have public and private repositories. When publishing email to a public repository, by default permission request emails only go out to non-members of the organization. (And permission is never required to publish stuff to a private repository.) - You can now anonymize any message contributor. Anonymized message contributors don't receive permission requests. Users can later anonymize or de-anonymize themselves at any point. (This works even if message contributors haven't yet created an account.) - Threads are now SEO optimized. We basically take all the incoming garbage HTML that is modern email, and output it as really clean and minimalist HTML. (This also ensures that the redaction feature never breaks.) - We now have pretty decent video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4--bpq5LSKZ9LS44po_NUx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjI... - Users and organizations now have RSS feeds of their email, e.g.: https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex3917 https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex391... - Lots of recirc features, e.g. trending threads. New features in the pipeline: - Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment. - The front end is being completely re-written in React. Right now the front end loads in about 800ms, we're hoping to get it down to half that or less. (In comparison, the oEmbed loads in 80 - 130ms, hard to get much better without changing the speed of light.) - We're building a Gmail plug-in. This will allow people to publish directly from their Gmail, and it won't require read-only access to the user's entire inbox. (Even though our privacy policy is very good!) When we built the site we knew that no one needs or is looking for a new social network, so we figured that we aren't going to get many sign ups until people have read at least 100 really good threads on the site. We're not quite there yet, in terms of having enough content and traction for this to be a real business yet, but we're trending in the right direction and I'm hopeful we'll be close by the end of the year. But yeah, overall we're basically just trying to make the Internet fun and weird again, the way I remember it when I was a kid but with a more modern twist. And also a real business model, no BS advertising, ever. Also, for all the stuff that gets published about how addictive social networks are, try actually building one; nothing is more addictive (or inspiring) than a blank page.

owens99 8y ago

Very cool product! Will follow this and I hope it is successful.

craftyguy 8y ago
I sure hope they aren't. This is terrifying, from a privacy perspective.
- owens99 8y ago
  True, but only because it is OAuth. I like the overall concept if I don't have to share access to my inbox. Better if it was via forwarding to a specific address.
  - amsheehan 8y ago
    We are actively working on a gmail add-on which would allow you to not give us access to your inbox, rather, publish single threads to the site through the gmail interface. We have a few tickets open with Google to narrow the scope of the permissions available to us for exactly that reason! :)

mirceal 8y ago

Interesting idea, but anything that wants to read my email is a big Nope.

Alex3917 8y ago
No OAuth is needed to make an account. For most social sites (e.g. HN), 95% of the content comes from 5% of the users. We're not trying to be any different, beyond the fact that it's also a useful business tool. Also, when our Gmail plugin gets released the OAuth story will be much better. Basically they have a scope that's read-only OAuth, but the plugin only gets access to the thread that's currently open when the user activates the plugin for that thread. That's exactly how it should work. There are still a couple features missing, we can build it without them but we're trying to work with Google to save some duplicated code on our backend.
beager 8y ago
Would be much easier and persuasive to the privacy-sensitive to provide an email address to send emails to and process them from there.

myrandomcomment 8y ago

Four wheel drive? WTH? Can you please offer a ..... :(

sbr464 8y ago

This is a cool concept, have to think about all the good things I may have spread across years of random PST files or gmail accounts. Hopefully at least one in there!

amsheehan 8y ago
One of the features we have is a naive suggestion engine. Upon signing up you can feed the app a list of keywords. These key words are used to surface relevant threads from your inbox. You can see this in action in this video: https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8 https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8

sush99 8y ago

I signed up, but I cant figure out how to delete my fweveryone account- is that not an option?

Alex3917 8y ago
You can use Postman or whatever to send a DELETE request to https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account with your authorization token, but it's not in the front end yet. Alternatively just send us an email and I'll delete it.
- sush99 8y ago
  Thanks! I like the website, and probably will stick around. Was just curious about not having the delete option :)

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meesterdude 8y ago

Really thought this was some high-brow joke - nope! This is a real product/service to share your emails. I think this is a truly terrible idea. But what do I know? google thought it was a good idea to have copies of the usernames/passwords for all the sites I visit stored on their servers. I think that's also a truly terrible idea - but they're a billion dollar company. I would never use (to share) and I am doubtful I would find any thread between two other people worthwhile. But if they can find a paying userbase, mazel tov.

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jeswin 8y ago

Sync my inbox? So basically, if you get hacked, all my emails are public. Or at the very least, an untrusted third party (you) gets to read everyone's private email? No way I'll use it, nor allow anyone else I know to do so.

mlatu 8y ago
Sadly you won't have any say in the latter.
jenscow 8y ago
I actually thought it was a joke.
momentmaker 8y ago
I feel like this would be a good use case to use blockchain where the code would be public and your email messages could be encrypted.
- ajhurliman 8y ago
  There was an IOTA "random" wallet generator where they posted the codebase online, but they had additional code on the page that made the range of generated wallets really narrow. The owner eventually robbed everyone. I'd still be skeptical.

ryan-allen 8y ago

The last time I hit reply all by accident I lost my job.

ydushyant 8y ago
oh, what happened?
forbes 8y ago
What, did you call a client a Giraffe or something?
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  It was something like 'Giraffe', but rhymes with 'punt'.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Lesson I learned early in my career, luckily not on my own: never write something that you really don't want someone to see, especially bosses and clients and especially swearing. Mails are replied to, mails are forwarded, long chains of emails happen, your stuff gets out. A colleague at one of my first work places made fun of a client. 10-20 replies and forwards later, his mail was sent to a client. Luckily I think his message was buried too deep in the resulting mail and the client didn't see it. I did, though, as did several people from my team. We didn't say anything but we all learned a lesson that day :)
    - isostatic 8y ago
      This type of thing was always inevitable from the day top-posting became acceptable (and pretty much mandated by the email clients) Before then, you would reply to points in line and trim unneeded information. The entire conversation wasn't bolted on to be ignored by 99% of people.
      - oblio 8y ago

yycom 8y ago

But what is it? "Learn more" is just videos.

Tepix 8y ago
It's a blank page that shows "Loading FWD:Everyone" ;-)

mychael 8y ago

It blows my mind that people are having "Group Chat" conversations like that via Email. Have they never heard of WhatsApp?

wongarsu 8y ago
Email is much better for longer, well thought out replies and keeping track of multiple threads of conversation, each of which may have no activity for days at a time. Whatsapp is fairly limited to quick, short replies (mostly because of interface restrictions). Even chat-like email threads have much longer messages interspersed than what you would see on WhatsApp. Email also has much better tools for finding old messages than WhatsApp

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peter_retief 8y ago

I joined up, how do I ask for accomodation advice for a week in London in August? Do I have the right idea of the app?

Alex3917 8y ago
Other way around. If you have conversations in your inbox that you think would be interesting or useful to others, then you should post them! We have a suggestion engine though, so if you enter in your hobbies / interests / work projects into the relevant field on the settings page then we do a pretty good job of surfacing relevant threads. (At least as good as we can do just using metadata search, since we don't actually access anything in your inbox except the stuff you choose to upload.) But yeah we have a bunch of travel advice like that, it's definitely fun to read.

yellowapple 8y ago

I'm sorry, but the idea of a product designed specifically to facilitate the mass redistribution of communications normally assumed to be private by default is deeply disturbing. Do I need to start including EULAs in every email I send? In what multiverse is this sort of thing okay? Unless permission requests are mandatory and forever will be (regardless of anonymization), I will automatically refuse to communicate via email (and possibly any other implied-private medium, including one-to-one chats, mail, and SMS) with anyone I know to be using this service; instead, the only communications from me with these people will be through systems/services in which communications are already assumed to be public or shared (e.g. forums, mailing lists, public social media posts, blog posts / webpages, etc.). Likewise, I will never use this service myself; there are plenty of services out there that facilitate public-record written electronic communication while being upfront about it. To reiterate: my emails to others should be considered private between myself and the recipient unless both of us explicitly consent to their publication, anonymized or otherwise. That's basic fucking courtesy - courtesy which FWD:Everyone seems to be explicitly designed to violate.

beager 8y ago
The thing is, they could easily extract participants and require opt-in from all parties.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
It requires opt-in from all participants in the conversation, as Alex posted down this thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425 > We actually currently require double opt-in permission for each message contributor in a thread to share stuff publicly. That might change in the future, we're still playing around with the model. And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Per Alex's comment on this post (and, in fact, the current top comment): "Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment." It requires opt-in from all parties now, but there's already a publicized plan to change that. "And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose." I'm not sure how "don't worry guys, we're intentionally building a product to facilitate the wholesale violation of decades-old email etiquette and common courtesy" is supposed to make this idea sound any less horrific.

koyao 8y ago

So basically have Twitter expand its character limit and ask everyone to replace their emails with Twitter? How cool is that? :)

heedlessly3 8y ago
Quora and Reddit would serve essentially the same purpose for readers. That fact that it's email makes it more likely for an accidental leak of personal information.

2ion 8y ago

> * Less work than blogging, way more benefits > > * Build a community around your inbox > > * Only share the emails you intend to It's just a fancy mailing list then? Minus the SMTP leg, plus privacy/consent issues and moving to a non-free storage format as well as concentrating the presence of the "thread" at one site. The best email lore out there is saved to mailing list archives and can be linked to and shared just as easily. And mailing lists take "forwards" too.

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cryptonector 8y ago
Might as well build a tool to blogify mailing list archives. If the list is private you can always publish the blog-form summary if you have the authority to do it. But there's no way to monetize that -- you have to provide much more than that, and centralize things in the process, in order to monetize. For corporate customers who want to publish into an org, rather than the world, this service might actually be very valuable. For non-corporate uses this might make some sense, but for me... I'd not let a third party read my email.
Alex3917 8y ago
> It's just a fancy mailing list then? It's more of a social network built around email conversations. E.g. we make it easy to not only to leave comments and share on social, but also to embed threads within any other site. Unlike email lists, we're also designed to make it easy to share great conversations after the fact, rather than having everyone copied on every message as it happens. I think one good use case for the site is sharing the best conversations from otherwise private mailing lists. (With everyone's permission, or if the list specifically allows it.) > moving to a non-free storage format If you look at the API response for our threads, it's actually much easier to parse than any archival format. That said we're not (currently) an archival product; we don't store the original raw messages, and we don't output them into archival formats designed for longterm storage. I would like to integrate with some archival products in the future though. Right now when you donate your email archives to a university, they are only readable in the reading room of the university after signing an NDA with the librarian. I think we offer a good solution for making it easy to redact some of the more interesting threads and get them on the web, and I think a lot of that stuff would be super interesting.

danielsamuels 8y ago

Recently I've been thinking about writing a service which simply has an email address you forward an email to and it makes it publicly available via a URL - useful for things like open letters etc. I'm not sure if this is the same thing, or whether I should just go ahead and make it..

tylermenezes 8y ago

I don't use Gmail. Is there a way to forward an email as the name implies, or does it only work with Gmail?

amsheehan 8y ago
Currently we rely on the gmail API, but it is on our roadmap to expand to the other major email providers. Is there one in particular that you would like to see on FWD:Everyone?

CaptainZeepzorp 8y ago

Ahh this is such a great idea for a website!! Hope it takes off, it would be so great to see correspondences between professors or politicians.

amsheehan 8y ago
Thank you! We hope so too. There's so much first hand knowledge locked up in inboxes that people would like to share.

ryboflavin8 8y ago

We used this at the editorial house I'm at to organize the editing pipeline. Super helpful when there are a bunch of people passing around different parts of a project over email. Really hope this succeeds.

vinayms 8y ago

Beyond the privacy concerns raised by others, I am not sure what this would amount to. Interesting conversations don't happen everyday, so this site might become just a collection of random email conversations that people submit that think is interesting. I am not sure if anyone wants to read them either. Further, I don't think everything is "communityfiable". Like I said earlier, interesting conversations don't happen often, so stuff like following a person due to his one email upload or whatever, recommendations etc all seem a bit too much. Following would make sense if it is someone who uploads stuff often, but in this case anyone who does it would be breaching someone else's privacy unless the uploader is part of the conversation and everyone agrees to share it. But, again, as I said earlier, interesting conversations happen only once in a while. That said, I remember how twitter was derided in the beginning as being a platform for people to share boring stuff that no one cares about, but it turned out to become something else, though not by design but only by chance, and is now quite successful.

Alex3917 8y ago
These things sometimes evolve in unexpected ways, and sometimes it just takes a while for people to figure out how to really use something. Use cases I think are especially compelling: - Industry leaders who get asked the same questions a lot - Professors and notable intellectuals who already give their email archives to a university when they die, and would like some of the accessible on the web. - Politicians. Their emails are already published under FOIA, but I think it would be super useful to folks campaigning also. - YouTubers, bloggers, Twitch folks, etc. And then there are dozens of business use cases also for sharing stuff internally. I’m sure there are lots of other uses beyond these though!

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acjohnson55 8y ago

I've been friends with the Alex duo for years now and I'm so impressed with how they've stuck with this core vision. Glad to see the engagement this is getting.

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