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Show HN: I introduced link sharing to Gmail

8 points by laurinstahl 5y ago

laurinstahl 5y ago
The biggest challenge with this project was to get the Chrome Extension to work properly. For example, to get Segment to work, we had to find an old version of their analytics.js and manually change it until it worked - and would stop sending page tracking events which would automatically include the subject lines of people’s emails… a big privacy concern. So after teaching myself to work with react I set out. What I did not expect was how difficult it would be to get the chrome extension to work properly, and how to embed things into Gmails UI. The ability to access local assets in CSS files to use them as background images proved another challenge at first - a problem which may sound trivial, but until I found out how to insert CSS through background.js in manifest3, it took me quite some googling. Ultimately, our main motivation behind this product was that while we solve a very small user problem, we wanted to build it as professional as we can, and I am very happy with the result.
Vladimof 5y ago
moralestapia 5y ago
Whoa, very nice. Thanks for this and congrats for shipping!
- laurinstahl 5y ago
  Thanks moralestapia, looking forward to hearing any feedback from you!
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    I think it's really well done and it's evident that you also care a lot of about how your product looks like, I thing the design/UI is top-notch. I hope it catches on, remember that you can't ever escape marketing, so keep an eye on that and good luck!
nathanganser 5y ago
How does it actually work? Do you save the email content on your servers and generate a link to that content?
- laurinstahl 5y ago
  Hi Nathan, No, we haven't worked on this ability, yet - but it is something that we might look into the future. Has huge data privacy implications though Right now, we simply are able to generate a link to the email that is sharable across everyone that is on the same email thread. It's dependant on some Gmail functions to make it work - what we need to store on our servers is only the email's message ID
alberth 5y ago
Google Workspace needs a centralized wiki/doc-store for teams members so bad. Like Notion but for Google Workspace. This seems to be touching on the edges of such needed functionality. Wishing you best of luck.
- laurinstahl 5y ago
  Thanks, alberth!

8 points by laurinstahl 5y ago

The biggest challenge with this project was to get the Chrome Extension to work properly. For example, to get Segment to work, we had to find an old version of their analytics.js and manually change it until it worked - and would stop sending page tracking events which would automatically include the subject lines of people’s emails… a big privacy concern. So after teaching myself to work with react I set out. What I did not expect was how difficult it would be to get the chrome extension to work properly, and how to embed things into Gmails UI. The ability to access local assets in CSS files to use them as background images proved another challenge at first - a problem which may sound trivial, but until I found out how to insert CSS through background.js in manifest3, it took me quite some googling. Ultimately, our main motivation behind this product was that while we solve a very small user problem, we wanted to build it as professional as we can, and I am very happy with the result.

Vladimof 5y ago

moralestapia 5y ago

Whoa, very nice. Thanks for this and congrats for shipping!

laurinstahl 5y ago
Thanks moralestapia, looking forward to hearing any feedback from you!
- moralestapia 5y ago
  I think it's really well done and it's evident that you also care a lot of about how your product looks like, I thing the design/UI is top-notch. I hope it catches on, remember that you can't ever escape marketing, so keep an eye on that and good luck!

nathanganser 5y ago

How does it actually work? Do you save the email content on your servers and generate a link to that content?

laurinstahl 5y ago
Hi Nathan, No, we haven't worked on this ability, yet - but it is something that we might look into the future. Has huge data privacy implications though Right now, we simply are able to generate a link to the email that is sharable across everyone that is on the same email thread. It's dependant on some Gmail functions to make it work - what we need to store on our servers is only the email's message ID

alberth 5y ago

Google Workspace needs a centralized wiki/doc-store for teams members so bad. Like Notion but for Google Workspace. This seems to be touching on the edges of such needed functionality. Wishing you best of luck.

laurinstahl 5y ago
Thanks, alberth!