12 ms·

Show HN: Inbox Zero – open-source email assistant

• felixg3 3y ago
  This is not an email assistant. It is a Google Mail, or Gmail, assistant. Get it right, I’ve seen this so many times that people use proprietary web platform synonymously with email.
• sparrish 3y ago
  I'm a firm believer and practitioner of the 'inbox zero' method of email management. Naming this inbox helper/organizer the same may confuse people. Why did you choose that name? Seems a disservice to the method you're trying to promote.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • johnchristopher 3y ago
    Probably semantic drifting ?
  • pedalpete 3y ago
    In the defence of the creator, I assume they're goal was not to create a "newsletter manager", they probably just saw that as low hanging fruit to relieve some of the pain of managing an inbox. I can easily see them adding more and more features which improve email and nudge users to inbox zero. I think this is a decent starting point, and for a repo that is only 5 months old, it looks like they've done a decent job of understanding a good UX, and showing the user the emails they are most likely going to want to archive, etc.
    • elieskilled 3y ago
      Yes. There are already a few features it offers beyond the newsletter cleaner like the AI automation with more to come. The overall goal of the app is to help manage email better. It could turn into a full fledged email app one day too.
• smy20011 3y ago
  Thanks but I would like to have a localLM version. I don't want my email sent to any third party for analysis.
  • cchance 3y ago
    So spin up a local llm with openai compatible api, and selfhost the inbox zero yourself lol it's opensource
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    We plan to add this!
• ryandrake 3y ago
  For me, the hardest part about inbox-zero is that I use my inbox as a todo list. And a lot (most?) of my job involves reading an E-mail where Alice has a problem and needs me to E-mail Bob to get them to do something. So now I have two things in my todo list: 1. hound Bob until he finally reads his E-mail and does the thing, and 2. follow up with Alice to let her know the thing is done. I haven't yet found any great way besides email-as-todo list to manage this. Multiply this by 15-30 things at a time, and I end up with at least 30-60 things in my inbox. Gmail's "stars" are an OK solution, but I tend to forget to unstar things when they're done, so I need to periodically do star-cleanups. And copy pasting tasks from my inbox into some other specialized todo tool has never really been worth the trouble. The todo apps just aren't integrated enough with the rest of my E-mail based workflow. And there's never a point where I'm not waiting on someone so I never really get to zero.
  • andsoitis 3y ago
    > most?) of my job involves reading an E-mail where Alice has a problem and needs me to E-mail Bob to get them to do something. Why are you the intermediary? Could you instead just connect Alice with the right person (in this case Bob) and they can work through the detail? Why play telephone?
    • ryandrake 3y ago
      LOL I ask myself this often. In a perfect world where everyone knows everyone and where everyone has the time and energy to hound everyone else, this part of Project Management wouldn't even exist. But in big companies, people get siloed and isolated from other teams, people get busy, they forget, so they need a juggler like me to keep all the balls in the air.
      • kstrauser 3y ago
        For your own sanity, don't be that in-between. It's fine to be the person they ask, but use that as an excuse to introduce the parties and then step out of the way. It's good to use your domain knowledge to make the company run more smoothly. It's not so good to become the chokepoint, or the company directory.
• bytethis 3y ago
  “By continuing you agree to allow Inbox Zero to send your emails to OpenAI for processing.” Yeah, unfortunately this kills it for me. Handing my whole personal inbox over to OpenAI seems insane.
  • viraptor 3y ago
    I'm not sure if that's already exposed as an option, but if you're happy to run this app locally, then LiteLlm exposes local models using the OpenAI API. That means you only need to change the endpoint, tell LiteLlm to use for example Mistral and it should "just work". Even if not implemented yet, it would be a trivial change.
    • wise_young_man 3y ago
      > It would be a trivial change. My favorite line in the tech industry.
    • rolisz 3y ago
      Trivial change, except for also having to change all the prompts to work well with Mistral. LLMs are not equal, you have to ask each one "nicely" in a different way.
      • viraptor 3y ago
        You can change the prompts if you want better results. But you don't have to do it. I've replaced GPT endpoint with LiteLlm a few times already and had to adjust the prompt only once. If I can't see the difference, why bother?
        • elieskilled 3y ago
          The project uses the ai npm package from Vercel which does interface with a lot of different LLMs. But I imagine there is a little work for it to just work with any provider. I think it would be really cool to get it running with something like Mistral in the browser: https://webllm.mlc.ai/ https://webllm.mlc.ai/
• rareitem 3y ago
  I think a cool addition would be some kind of addon or integration to existing email services/clients. It would reduce the cost of user acquisition.
  • slenk 3y ago
    Would be great if it worked with generic IMAP email accounts
• jbverschoor 3y ago
  I don’t like giving access to my email to some online tool
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • hammyhavoc 3y ago
    So self-host it if you find the tool to have value for your needs.
    • jbverschoor 3y ago
      Will do, that wasn't really clear tbh.. "open source" and "github" get filtered out just like ads by my brain these days
• _xnmw 3y ago
  The AI-powered rules thing is revolutionary. I can't even begin to imagine what it can do, but I'd rather it didn't just do it automatically, but rather put it into a queue for me to approve. I'd love an AI assistant to write draft replies automatically for me to edit and send out.
  • berkes 3y ago
    According to the documentation that's exactly what the "planning mode" is supposed to do.
    • elieskilled 3y ago
      Correct! :)
  • andenacitelli 3y ago
    My budgeting app (Monarch) has a system with a lot of parallels. It tries to automatically profile your transactions into a sensible category based on the statement text, and also allows you to set up persistent rules on top to categories it may have messed up. It still has a “we couldn’t categorize this, please help” list it gives you, but I find its recommendations fairly good and I get maybe one transaction a month it can’t figure out.
    • aaomidi 3y ago
      Same as https://copilot.money https://copilot.money, been an awesome service. Note I’m not affiliated with them, I just enjoy it quite a bit. Here’s a referral code if you want: https://copilot.money/link/oHumEVHZNbPpLVgf9 https://copilot.money/link/oHumEVHZNbPpLVgf9
  • motoxpro 3y ago
    As sibling says, video highlights exactly this feature.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    That's how it works. The default is to queue it for you for you to approve :)
• allan_s 3y ago
  For the pricing they propose both a saas model and one-time fee I'm curious what's the opinion of people here about both pricing model Is there a multiplier or an absolute number that will make you switch ? (Not specifically for this product)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    ATM it's per account, but if we'll make it easier to add multiple accounts in the future. If you're buying to day then feel free to email elie at getinboxzero to help out.
• pandominium 3y ago
  gmail has unubscribe button right at the start of an email. It will take a while to unsubscribe, but I think it's manageable. the AI feature to automatically reply would be helpful.
• dugite-code 3y ago
  Kind of reminds me of the old POPFile (and the IMAP extension) I used to use years ago. Email comes in, is classified and sorted into the appropriate folder. I had always intended to add labels to it but never got around to learning Pearl to do it.
  • neilv 3y ago
    A popular power-user tool on Unix-like systems was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail
    • dugite-code 3y ago
      Popfile is a per folder bayesian auto classification system, procmail's more of full fat server mail filter system. You could get procmail to do the same thing but it would require a bit of work and certainly isn't an out of the box sort of thing.
• neilv 3y ago
  How does this software relate to the popular email inbox management method of the same name? Merlin Mann, "Inbox Zero", Google TechTalks, 2007-07-23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk
  • criddell 3y ago
    Mann holds a trademark on “Inbox Zero”. He’s likely involved in some way.
    • madeofpalk 3y ago
      I highly doubt he’s involved with this, and he would probably be pretty annoyed with the name being used. My understanding is that he’s grown to be a bit resentful of how the term has been carried away and used, and he cringes/dislikes software that “misuse” the term.
    • elieskilled 3y ago
      He isn't involved. Or hold the trademark.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    It's used in the sense that you want to better manage your email and clear the noise. But ultimately the purpose of the tool is to make you more effective at email. Spend less time organising and getting spammed.
• akeck 3y ago
  I stopped doing Inbox Zero when I realized email search (O365 and Gmail in my case) is sufficient for my needs. I just don't have the energy to sort all my email, even with AI help. All I do lately is the occasional pass to delete large attachments and newsletters.
  • mstngl 3y ago
    This was my paradigm through the last years and I'm always promoting it to my colleagues. What for should invest something in folder structures (representing only one of many possible criterias)? Reliable automation for this task find its limits when subject-lines are not written in in a formally complete an consistent manner. And of course since Googlemail preached "never delete" we all stick to some email hoarding attitute (better having it than needing it, especially for long running projects there are some arguments). This way I left a 90 GB Mailbox at the company I worked for before. :-) But such unstructured bunch of emails is hard to manage, if any subset is to be handled over to another person or to be archived in some other environment. Furthermore size limitations for the inbox will force you to get rid of something earlier or later. And there is no fun in going through thousands of emails from years ago. Therefor I recently started to at least using a rough structure of folders for archiving (all mounted as sub-folders of Inbox and therefore searchable at a glance). Some categories (ToDo, Waiting for result etc.) I'm realizing by categories in Outlook. This is quite handy to follow-up as search-queries for those categories and more can be pinned as virtual folders in Outlook. However, I wish there were more tools in Outlook for categorizing emails while leaving them all in the same place. I'm not sure whether I ever will become an exemplary user of Inbox Zero or even reach this state.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    Agree, you shouldn't overdo your email. Many people waste time organising for no benefit. The goal of the Inbox Zero app is to make you more efficient. Not that you spend even more time cleaning your email.
• orliesaurus 3y ago
  I wanted to build this, glad you built this! Thank you!... but the AI part needs to run locally for me to even think about using it as it is today.
  • LanternLight83 3y ago
    I've tried running a few open source apps like this locally, sometimes it's as simple as standing up a Mock OpenAI endpoint but if they use fancy features like embeddings endpoints then it can be more complicated. The quality is getting better, but it's always not-the-same.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    Feel free to contribute to this :) Will look to add local LLM support soon.
• xyst 3y ago
  Weird that it’s only offered to Gmail or Gsuite users. Email is supposed to be provider agnostic. I guess this app is using Gmail/gsuite proprietary apis to do its magic.
  • AdrianEGraphene 3y ago
    This is the norm for a few good reasons.
    • madeofpalk 3y ago
      What are a few good reasons?
      • elieskilled 3y ago
        They offer an API. Most people use Gmail so most companies target this first.
• zdwolfe 3y ago
  This is really cool but I will never trust an app like this to have access to my emails.
  • knubie 3y ago
    What kind of app would you trust to have access to your emails?
    • t09i209ba893 3y ago
      I'm not the OP, but I would only trust an app like this if it didn't require any external services whatsoever. If every component can be self hosted + they add support for a local maildir or maybe IMAP, then it would be fun to try self hosting an instance of this app, but without that I wouldn't have any interest.
      • cchance 3y ago
        I mean it says you can self host it yourself... and its on github and opensource, and if it's using openai api, you can always use a self hosted api that's compatible with openai api to run mistral or llama to run it all locally.
        • t09i209ba893 3y ago
          Yes, you're right, but I don't know if it's possible to replace the tinybird component with anything local, perhaps there's a convenient alternative I'm not aware of (I'd never heard of tinybird before seeing it in the README's list of external services). Either way, the documentation doesn't have a lot of information about a local-only use case, so I can only imagine it would be inconvenient. If they add support for self hosted mail sources in the future, it may still be worth trying though.
          • elieskilled 3y ago
            Yes, atm it relies on Tinybird. But the level of trust you need for that is different. And the data in Tinybird is encrypted so even if you don't trust them to run a Clickhouse database, if you set an encryption key they won't be able to do much with your data. We are planning to support a version that doesn't rely on Tinybird at all but stores all data in your browser using indexeddb.
• hidelooktropic 3y ago
  "We only support Gmail and Gsuite email accounts today" Nice work here but here's where innovation could start with another smart email client in the crowded market. It seems they are all "gmail now and outlook on the roadmap" I know these are common email suites but why not friendly and open protocols like Fastmail's JMAP? Gmail is also precisely the product that needs this extra functionality the least.
  • joshdickson 3y ago
    It’s a lot harder to figure out if you have product market fit when you’re choosing a starting point that significantly reduces your addressable market.
  • NavinF 3y ago
    Tbh it would make more sense for other providers like Fastmail to provide a Gmail-compatible API since that seems to be the defacto standard. They could open source the Gmail to JMAP translation layer if they want to improve interoperability.
    • taskforcegemini 3y ago
      my brother used to say it's stupid to use firefox, internet explorer is the defacto standard
      • NavinF 3y ago
        He was just early: FF market share is 3% and dropping. It's all about UX
  • vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Do GMail and Outlook (and Exchange?) support JMAP? I'm all for open standards, but as a sibling put it, when you're starting out, you may not want to limit your market size, unless you know you're addressing some kind of niche to begin with.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
• jbandela1 3y ago
  If you are looking for a simple solution for inbox zero for gmail - quickly classify emails as archive, follow-up, read through, take a look at my hacky attempt. https://github.com/google/cpp-from-the-sky-down/blob/master/rust_gmail_sorter/src/main.rs https://github.com/google/cpp-from-the-sky-down/blob/master/... It is inspired by vim. It downloads all the email snippets and sorts them in descending order by sender and date. Then you use “j”, “k” to navigate through the emails. You can press “a” for archive, “f” for follow up, and “r” for read through. You can also press “p” to navigate to next email prefix (the stuff before the @) and “d” to navigate to the next domain. Like vim you can combine keystrokes. “ad” will archive all the emails from the present position to the next domain. Since these are sorted by reverse date, often you can look at recent dates and archive the rest. All operations happen in memory so they are instantaneous. You the press “w” to actually move the messages on the server as a batch operation. It is really useful if you are getting started or are falling behind and need to quickly classify a few thousand emails. It is a single 500 line Rust program so you can hack on it to change it to how you like it.
  • snthpy 3y ago
    Sounds great! I also had a chuckle that this is a rust app under the cpp-from-the-sky-down repo.
  • greentea23 3y ago
    https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt is a mature project with similar functionality in its arsenal via tagging and vim bindings, not limited to gmail either. You can also write emails in vim/$EDITOR fluidly.
  • stevage 3y ago
    Gmail lets you customise keyboard shortcuts and has custom labels so you can basically do that exact thing without any third party tools or workflows.
• aragonite 3y ago
  This is probably a symptom of my severe boredom, but I tried to find the tweeted testimonials on Twitter, and it seems quite a few of the testimonials do not correspond to real tweets. The testimonials by "@james", "@yoni", "@ktyr" are pretty obviously not real just from their implausibly short Twitter handles. The actual Twitter handles have different profile pics that simply don't match the ones displayed on the landing page. For example @ktyr is not an Indian male but an Asian girl who hasn't tweeted since 2012. @prem_saini1 also is not the same person. @emarky is the same person, but he doesn't seem to have tweeted the testimonial. As I said, I'm just really bored :)
  • Cyphase 3y ago
    If you inspect the DOM, some of the avatars mention Twitter URLs. Some reference other domains. "@james"'s avatar references Unsplash; here's the image, by Midas Hofstra: https://unsplash.com/photos/man-in-white-crew-neck-t-shirt-a6PMA5JEmWE https://unsplash.com/photos/man-in-white-crew-neck-t-shirt-a... The Unsplash one is possibly the most suspicious. The others might not be Twitter handles, or the person might not have said it in a tweet.
    • aragonite 3y ago
      Good find, @yoni also it seems: https://unsplash.com/photos/man-wearing-white-v-neck-shirt-iFgRcqHznqg https://unsplash.com/photos/man-wearing-white-v-neck-shirt-i...
  • vidarh 3y ago
    The ProductHunt link at the top suggests perhaps that is where the testimonials are from. It's not clear why you think they're meant to be tweets. A quick scan of the Product Hunt page quickly found at least one that has a reply saying they'll add it to the testimonials if ok.
    • pragmatick 3y ago
      Good point, but https://www.producthunt.com/@james/reviews https://www.producthunt.com/@james/reviews didn't review this.
• kazinator 3y ago
  How can you unsubscribe with one click from some newsletter mails from a site to which you're not logged in? You have to log into that account find the preferences panel which controls the spam and uncheckbox something or whatever. Is this managing throwaway mail aliases?
  • yonrg 3y ago
    GDPR requires newsletters (not talking about spam) to include unsubscribe links (or similar) in the mails they send. Those are most of the times in the mail body and also sometimes in the mail headers.
    • mft_ 3y ago
      But in reality, don’t a proportion of these unsubscribe links do what the previous poster suggested: link you to a proprietary system that requires you to log in to ‘update your mail preferences’?
      • kazinator 3y ago
        I recently had to solve a captcha in order to unsubscribe from something! The unsubscribe link included a cookie in the URL which identified what is being unsusbscribed. Only the e-mail recipient would reasonably follow that link. And yet captcha in your face.
    • elieskilled 3y ago
      Google will start being even stricter here from February 2024 btw.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    One-click where it's possible. You can always auto archive emails for any sender (which we also offer with a single click).
• danjc 3y ago
  My interpretation of inbox zero (and the only approach that keeps me sane): - use rules to move automated emails to sub-folders - anything that requires work or a response goes to an "unhandled" folder - anything else in inbox goes to archive after I've read it
• samanator 3y ago
  I've written a locally running app that is a lightweight version of this. You can download all your emails, it loads it into sqlite, and you can browse and sort by aggregate email counts (how many emails each sender sent). Once you select a sender, you can archive all of the emails it sent you. I'd have loved to have made it a full fleshed app like this. Kudos!
  • tecleandor 3y ago
    Have you published anything? I was thinking to do something vaguely similar for me.
    • samanator 3y ago
      I haven't published anything. If you're interested I could clean it up and send it to you. Let me know. My email is in my profile.
      • tecleandor 3y ago
        Oh! What language is it in? I'll write you now from a pierdelacabeza dot com domain so I don't forget it later.
        • samanator 3y ago
          python, but if other people would like to use it, I'd rewrite it in go for the sake of easy distribution.
• theusus 3y ago
  Gmail only :/
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    What do you use?
    • theusus 3y ago
      Outlook
• figassis 3y ago
  I have a serious issue with products that claim to be email solutions in every corner of their marketing and then, buried in the FAQ, say that they’re GMAIL only. This is bait and switch for my time. I have multiple Gmail accounts, was considering the lifetime sub but I’ll pass.
  • boplicity 3y ago
    No kidding. Gmail is not email. It's an email client. And a very limited one at that.
    • stevage 3y ago
      It's an email service, with built in client. The spam filtering as part of the service is pretty good.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• jyrkesh 3y ago
  I had a lot of _ideas_ in my 20s. I fully spec'd out "On the Way" with a buddy of mine. Picking up beer close to your destination? Gas close to your departure point? The inverse? We would have you covered. We had a path with Google Maps API, and I was convinced that monetization was at least possible enough to get Real Life VC funding. In any case...this looks like a couple features. Sorry... :( It was a feature. Google Maps had it implemented to 75% of what we'd spec'd within 9-12 months. It's not like we'd actually tried, of course. We had full time jobs, for God's sake! But it became abundantly clear to me in that timeframe that FEATURE-sized ideas weren't gonna be viable. The Big Boy Ad Companies were gonna be burning those down for the next few months/years/forevers.
• tecleandor 3y ago
  I've been using Mailstrom service on and off for years for bulk classifying my mail and some automated rules, but it seems like they haven't added anything new in years (I think they are focusing in some sort of iPhone app now) and I've tried to contact them to ask a couple things and they don't answer my emails. So I've been thinking to make some sort of similar app to go through my mail metadata and make grouping and rules... "Delete this emails after a week, move all these others just when you receive them, send this others straight to the bin" with some extra smartness added.
  • doom2 3y ago
    Never thought I'd see my old employer mentioned on HN! When I left in the mid-2010s, they were just getting the mobile app off the ground. The first iteration was just trying to replicate some of the web app functionality with a new UI but I haven't checked in on it in years.
    • tecleandor 3y ago
      I have to make a correction now: I've been checking my mail and I've found that Leslie answered me but the message ended on my spam folder (hah!). The answer: They didn't have plans for the functionality I asked for. I asked for the possibility of deleting or moving certain emails after certain number of days (for example, for newsletters, billing emails, notices, and things like that). As of today, Mailstrom's functionality seems to be the same as 5 or more years ago. Which is not bad-bad, but not enough for me. It seems like the company is focusing on an iPhone app called Chuck [0] that's kind of similar but plus AI and some other stuff. I'll go build my own Lunar Lander. 0 : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chuck-smarter-email-with-ai/id1163872233
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    Feel free to open an issue: https://www.getinboxzero.com/github https://www.getinboxzero.com/github Or feature request: https://www.getinboxzero.com/feature-requests https://www.getinboxzero.com/feature-requests We can look to add it :)
• gardenhedge 3y ago
  How do customers know that the source code on Github is the actual source code used for the product?
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    Trust. There's no way to fully know. And even if you did there's way to abuse it anyway once you grant permission. If you care deeply about privacy then the best thing to do is self-host.
    • elieskilled 3y ago
      You can also see when we deploy each time on GitHub: https://github.com/elie222/inbox-zero/deployments https://github.com/elie222/inbox-zero/deployments
• oceanflame 3y ago
  The manner in which this is designed is irresponsible. This is an excellent example of how to commit fraud using surveillance.
  • elieskilled 3y ago
    How so?
• craftoman 3y ago
  Is it considered OK uploading every email to OpenAI? Asking for a friend.
• pnm45678 3y ago
  "Inbox Zero has undergone a thorough security process with Google to ensure the protection of your emails." Can you go into some more details on this? What security process, exactly?