6 ms·

Sweating the UI and UX details: Emails and Email Addresses

94 points by SteliE 13y ago

weixiyen 13y ago
Very nice. I think this could work for mobile as well. Select an input box, and have a tab for email, phone, or URL keyboards/pads.
jkubicek 13y ago
> “John Smith” <john@example.com> Why would email clients copy a string like this? In my entire history of email copying and pasting, I don't think I've ever wanted that text.
- philfreo 13y ago
  Well it's the standard format for displaying both the user's name & email address together (and part of the SMTP spec). But yeah - typically you just want the real address part. In Gmail at least you can get what you want with some careful highlighting - but Apple Mail doesn't let you copy that portion at all. Hence this feature :)
  - deweerdt 13y ago
    I'm going to go ahead and be pedantic: that format is not part of the SMTP spec. It's part of the Internet Message Format RFC (5322 in its latest incarnation), which describes what's in the body of the email. The SMTP spec (RFC 5321) which describes what goes on the wire between an SMTP client and an SMTP server uses addresses in a '<to@example.com>' format.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Curse you off-by-one errors!
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- joeblossom 13y ago
  When you copy from outlook, it copies that unless you first double click on the contact then select just the email address.
- timjahn 13y ago
  This is standard behavior for Outlook.
- jeffclark 13y ago
  Me neither. OS X Mail has a hidden option that you can enable, so that Mail copies just the email address. Copy this into your Terminal and restart Mail: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool false
  - jkubicek 13y ago
    That works perfectly. Thanks!
  - adrr 13y ago
    This is most useful thing i've learned all week. Thanks.
  - pqdbr 13y ago
    Can't thank you enough for this. Can't blame Apple enough for making this a hidden default one has to use the terminal to enable. WHY ?
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  If only copy+paste worked with structured data, rather than just plain text, we'd have this behaviour everywhere. Sure, it's not a trivial problem, but there must be something possible along these lines.
  - FuzzyDunlop 13y ago
    Possibly tangential, but you can copy and paste and get different results based on context (eg. copy image file, paste into HTML doc, get image tag; paste into terminal, get path; paste into mail client, get attachment; paste into image editor, get the image itself). It definitely works in OSX, but IIRC it's supported in Windows too. I last tried this around 18 months ago, in a Firefox extension. Was a bit fiddly but I could do what I wanted.
    - frenchy 13y ago
      It works on virtually all desktop systems (Linux, OSX, Windows) and has for a good long time, it's just a matter of whether or not the application has implemented support for it. You're more limited in what you can do in a web application though.
- positr0n 13y ago
  Lotus Notes :(
- twistedpair 13y ago
  Newsworthy? So they decided to copy how Gmail's contacts form has been working for the last 4 years? Brainwave!
- mseebach 13y ago
  In GMail it's very easy to get a string like that, and it has the added benefit of giving you name and address together in a single copy-paste.
hayksaakian 13y ago
Keep in mind you want to avoid premature optimization of both the back end and the front end. This is a great tip for a validated concept, but at the MVP stage, I wouldn't consider it priorty #1.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  So you're saying that MVPs should be of mediocre quality?
  - timjahn 13y ago
    MVPs should be the absolute bare minimum. If you're starting a grass cutting business, don't go buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers. Get a spreadsheet out and start signing up your customers. Is that mediocre quality? No. It's not prematurely optimizing for something that may never happen.
    - salman89 13y ago
      If you are in a crowded space, UX differentiation is a feature. In the case of close.io, they are competing against well entrenched market leaders. Making a high quality, easy to use sales communication tool is their MVP.
    - jrochkind1 13y ago
      I think an MVP has got to be as few "features" as you can get away with -- but each feature has got to be as HIGH QUALITY as you can make it, to stand out from the crowd. It's not year 2000, or even year 2010 anymore -- you probably have competitors, you need to differentiate somehow. Don't buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers -- but the ONE mower you buy, make it the BEST DAMN MOWER you can afford, well-thought out best for precisely the kind of mowing jobs you plan to focus on. (And this is only a great analogy to software if your customer is going to be actually USING your mower themselves!)
      - 13y ago
swanson 13y ago
Hey - could you guys open source that "extract email from crappy Outlook string" code? I would love to use it in my own app.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  You want them to open-source a regexp?
  - swanson 13y ago
    Sure - a basic version isn't super complicated or anything, but there are a lot of edge cases for various email clients, weird names, etc
- philfreo 13y ago
  We're using this library: https://github.com/andris9/addressparser https://github.com/andris9/addressparser But we're using it for more than just this scenario. If you're just concerned with this specific case you could come up with a simpler/shorter solution.
  - swanson 13y ago
    Thanks - I'll check out that library. I assume you guys use https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck also?
- jontas 13y ago
  Not sure what language you use, but it almost definitely supports PCRE. For email addresses, I always use this regex: http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html I've yet to run into a problem with it. If you want to extract an address from a larger string, then you need to slightly modify the regex to capture the email address from the string. This is going to depend somewhat on the language you're using, but probably involves wrapping everything between the first \b and the last \b in parentheses. I guess if I were certain that the target text was a "<name>" user@domain.com style string, I probably wouldn't use a regex (unnecessary overhead) and just split on > and trim or something silly like that.
hnriot 13y ago
One suggestion, you have track feature for imap clients, but that will only track emails from people in your contacts list. If you built a list of all the sent/received email addresses and added autocomplete to your input it would help. So I email person@example.com then go to close.io and start to add them to my contacts. As soon as I type per... the autosugest expands to the full email, and of course fills in the name too.
JimWestergren 13y ago
Nice integration of Tumblr. Same header, same design.
10char 13y ago
I wonder if you could do some kind of NLP-based input for contacts. Sort of like what Fantastical/Google Calendar do, maybe with some Graph Search-esque autocomplete to "teach" you the syntax? Along the lines of entering "Phil Freo, Director of Engineering, office phil@close.io, mobile 650-555-1234"
jrochkind1 13y ago
> We already know your email address when you signed up, and we use our own Mailgun account to send email as/from you, so that it just works. Hmm, isn't this asking for trouble? Having the emails you send put in spam queues, or eventually having your MTA IP address blacklisted even. When you're sending out emails from @somewhere.tld, even though you aren't in control of somewhere.tld or it's MX server, and sending out multiple emails from the same mail server. These days, sending email while remaining in the good graces of all the ISPs receiving email is awfully hard. cf http://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/warming_up.html http://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/warming_up.html
- philfreo 13y ago
  The number of messages we allow per day for accounts without their own SMTP credentials is very low. But yes, this is something we need to keep an eye on.
iamjonlee 13y ago
I don't use close.io, but here's what I'd also recommend if you haven't done them already: 1) allow the user to enter their phone numbers in whatever format they want: 4081231234, (408)123-1234, 408-123-1234 and format it after they click 'save' to (408)123-1234 or however you want it. 2)Cache the domain of the email address for autocomplete suggestions if they enter a website. For example, if you type in phil@close.io for the email, I can already suggest http://close.io http://close.io if you start typing in a website address.
- philfreo 13y ago
  We already do #1, but #2 is a good suggestion, thanks!
  - awj 13y ago
    Bikeshedding on #2, set up a blacklist of very obvious non-business domains. Very few people with @gmail.com or @hotmail.com actually own the business on that domain.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    If you want to make international phone number entry work better, I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about that recently. I've created a draft proposal you're more than welcome to follow up on at https://github.com/mtrimpe/jInternationalPhone https://github.com/mtrimpe/jInternationalPhone
    - philfreo 13y ago
      Interesting... looks promising. Using this would be tough while we share phone/email/urls fields though.
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
I have a very hard time taking any UI advice from a web-site which puts a static bar at the top of the page which you cannot remove. It is like being sent back in time to iFrames and makes using your page with a vertical device horrifying. I actually used the Chrome developer bar to Display: none it away. I guess that is the way you expect your users to use your site? Remove annoying counter-intuitive UI elements by eliminating them...
- thomas-st 13y ago
  What is the specific problem with the top bar? It goes away for small window sizes.
- awj 13y ago
  Middlebrow dismissal at its finest. Which is a shame, the article actually has some nice little usability ideas if you could get over yourself.
- bryne 13y ago
  Let me see if I can get the same tone as your comment: I have a hard time taking any complaint about vertical devices seriously when the page content is responsive and the bar is not static at lower resolutions. Perhaps rotate your monitor the other way if the loss of 69 pixels is causing you such heartburn?
rogerbinns 13y ago
Is there any particular reason you don't just have a multiline text box, and allow anything to be entered/pasted, and then just figure it out? Why should a human have to parse out bits of contact information and separately add each one to your form? (Your computers have billions of cpu cycles, bytes of memory and storage - surely they can do it.) For example I should be able to paste in any block from this page http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/publicrelationscontacts/asia-pacific-public-relations-1377283.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/publicrelationscont... and have it figure out names, email addresses, phone numbers etc.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Is that a common scenario? I am mostly moving single pieces of information rather than entire blocks of text like you're proposing. If we take your specific example, how would a computer even with "billions of cpu cycles" figure out which piece of information is someone's name and which is their job title? Or which is an address Vs. job title? Sorting data and understanding it is a "hard problem" and relatively speaking computing power plays a very small part of that. What plays a much larger part is just having MASSIVE databases of already sorted data to compare against (e.g. Siri).
  - rogerbinns 13y ago
    > Is that a common scenario? I am mostly moving single pieces of information rather than entire blocks of text like you're proposing. You most likely have the information as a single block especially if copying it from somewhere else. And it is certainly far easier if the user has to do one copy and paste versus once per field. In this particular case they have a user sitting there so the answer doesn't have to be perfect every time - they just have to make sure that if the heuristics mess up that it can be corrected (eg let the user drag and drop elements into the right arrangement/field names). > Or which is an address Vs. job title? The former is likely to occur in a geocoding database and the latter isn't. close.io focusses on sales so that immediately narrows down the likely possibilities for contact information. I'd be pretty sure naive code would have an 80% success rate, and analytics plus ongoing development would ensure ever improving success rates.
__david__ 13y ago
> We already know your email address when you signed up, and we use our own Mailgun account to send email as/from you, so that it just works. Unless your domain is setup to use strict SPF and then this will fail randomly (depending on if the recipient checks SPF or not). And do people really give their IMAP credentials to a web app?? I would never dream of doing that. That's the keys to the kingdom, right there...
- philfreo 13y ago
  > Unless your domain is setup to use strict SPF and then this will fail randomly Sure - but most people don't have this, and the goal is to get people to put in their SMTP credentials at some point anyway. Just doesn't have to be in their very first email. > And do people really give their IMAP credentials to a web app? Yep. We take security seriously and only end up tracking emails that match up with sales/leads in Close.io. For an entire company, their CRM data is often more important than an individual's inbox anyways - and we want to reduce the data entry necessary in common sales processes.
X4 13y ago
If you're at it, why not auto-detect the type of information? Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable, email address and website url are differntiatable too. I would even go so far and add an auto-import feature LinkedIn/Facebook/Google, that searches for the contact's "name(+address)" online and returns the "possible" results into the right fields automatically into your database. ;) @close.io team I don't use SaaS services except GitHub regularly, but if you would sell license your applicatoin I would buy a copy. I believe this is a good strategy when you've already a "satisfieable" amount of customers. But your mileage may vary.
- untog 13y ago
  Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable They aren't. At least not consistently- the UK (where I suspect you might be given you use of "mobile phone") prefixes them all with 07, but in the US and Canada there is no such difference.
- philfreo 13y ago
  > Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable, I'm not sure about this in a world with number portability. > email address and website url are differntiatable too Yep, we do this already. > auto-import feature LinkedIn/Facebook/Google, that searches for the contact's We'd like to pull in social data. It's not trivial, though services like FullContact.com can help.
  - X4 13y ago
    wow, I hoped, but didn't expect that someone actually listens to my tiny voice in the vacuum of the great Interspace. :) I honestly do highly appreciate that, it's a really great move by you and I'm grateful that you care about perfecting your product :) Most companies think they cannot afford listening to their users, those who do earn my deep respect. Btw. I'm from Germany and "mobile phones" can be differentiated easily here. Not only that, you'll even know which network the other number is signed up with. D1 T-Mobile: 0151x, 0160, 0170, 0171, 0175 D2 Vodafone: 0152x, 0162, 0172, 0173, 0174 E-Plus: 0157x, 0163, 0177, 0178 O2: 0159x*, 0176, 0179 Locating positions of landlines phone numbers is even easier, because there are databases. The picture in the german wikipedia article explains how the association with a location works (no need to read the entire article). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefonvorwahl http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefonvorwahl But here you can get a free Database containing all landline numbers: http://www.vorwahl-nummern.de/vorwahlen/download.php http://www.vorwahl-nummern.de/vorwahlen/download.php I really enjoy how metadata enriches actual data. Direct link: http://www.access-paradies.de/download/pool/vorwahlen_deutschland.txt http://www.access-paradies.de/download/pool/vorwahlen_deutsc...
nhm 13y ago
On mobile I've become used to phone/email specific keyboards when filling out forms. This idea wouldn't easily allow for that. Then again not enough websites use the input type feature yet anyway, so this is still an interesting improvement.
biot 13y ago
Have you A/B tested the "phone/email in any field" feature and found it results in easier data entry than telling people where to enter that information? I ask as it goes against the principle where giving people less choice can sometimes result in increased conversions. Here, you are asking users to make a choice (albeit, a tiny one) where to enter the information rather than having it consistent every time. Was there clear data which prompted you to implement this format? If so, I'd love to see the testing methodology.

94 points by SteliE 13y ago

Very nice. I think this could work for mobile as well. Select an input box, and have a tab for email, phone, or URL keyboards/pads.

jkubicek 13y ago

> “John Smith” <john@example.com> Why would email clients copy a string like this? In my entire history of email copying and pasting, I don't think I've ever wanted that text.

philfreo 13y ago
Well it's the standard format for displaying both the user's name & email address together (and part of the SMTP spec). But yeah - typically you just want the real address part. In Gmail at least you can get what you want with some careful highlighting - but Apple Mail doesn't let you copy that portion at all. Hence this feature :)
- deweerdt 13y ago
  I'm going to go ahead and be pedantic: that format is not part of the SMTP spec. It's part of the Internet Message Format RFC (5322 in its latest incarnation), which describes what's in the body of the email. The SMTP spec (RFC 5321) which describes what goes on the wire between an SMTP client and an SMTP server uses addresses in a '<to@example.com>' format.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Curse you off-by-one errors!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
joeblossom 13y ago
When you copy from outlook, it copies that unless you first double click on the contact then select just the email address.
timjahn 13y ago
This is standard behavior for Outlook.
jeffclark 13y ago
Me neither. OS X Mail has a hidden option that you can enable, so that Mail copies just the email address. Copy this into your Terminal and restart Mail: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool false
- jkubicek 13y ago
  That works perfectly. Thanks!
- adrr 13y ago
  This is most useful thing i've learned all week. Thanks.
- pqdbr 13y ago
  Can't thank you enough for this. Can't blame Apple enough for making this a hidden default one has to use the terminal to enable. WHY ?
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
If only copy+paste worked with structured data, rather than just plain text, we'd have this behaviour everywhere. Sure, it's not a trivial problem, but there must be something possible along these lines.
- FuzzyDunlop 13y ago
  Possibly tangential, but you can copy and paste and get different results based on context (eg. copy image file, paste into HTML doc, get image tag; paste into terminal, get path; paste into mail client, get attachment; paste into image editor, get the image itself). It definitely works in OSX, but IIRC it's supported in Windows too. I last tried this around 18 months ago, in a Firefox extension. Was a bit fiddly but I could do what I wanted.
  - frenchy 13y ago
    It works on virtually all desktop systems (Linux, OSX, Windows) and has for a good long time, it's just a matter of whether or not the application has implemented support for it. You're more limited in what you can do in a web application though.
positr0n 13y ago
Lotus Notes :(
twistedpair 13y ago
Newsworthy? So they decided to copy how Gmail's contacts form has been working for the last 4 years? Brainwave!
mseebach 13y ago
In GMail it's very easy to get a string like that, and it has the added benefit of giving you name and address together in a single copy-paste.

hayksaakian 13y ago

Keep in mind you want to avoid premature optimization of both the back end and the front end. This is a great tip for a validated concept, but at the MVP stage, I wouldn't consider it priorty #1.

skrebbel 13y ago
So you're saying that MVPs should be of mediocre quality?
- timjahn 13y ago
  MVPs should be the absolute bare minimum. If you're starting a grass cutting business, don't go buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers. Get a spreadsheet out and start signing up your customers. Is that mediocre quality? No. It's not prematurely optimizing for something that may never happen.
  - salman89 13y ago
    If you are in a crowded space, UX differentiation is a feature. In the case of close.io, they are competing against well entrenched market leaders. Making a high quality, easy to use sales communication tool is their MVP.
  - jrochkind1 13y ago
    I think an MVP has got to be as few "features" as you can get away with -- but each feature has got to be as HIGH QUALITY as you can make it, to stand out from the crowd. It's not year 2000, or even year 2010 anymore -- you probably have competitors, you need to differentiate somehow. Don't buy a pickup truck, a trailer, and 3 of those orange ride/stand-on mowers -- but the ONE mower you buy, make it the BEST DAMN MOWER you can afford, well-thought out best for precisely the kind of mowing jobs you plan to focus on. (And this is only a great analogy to software if your customer is going to be actually USING your mower themselves!)
    - 13y ago

swanson 13y ago

Hey - could you guys open source that "extract email from crappy Outlook string" code? I would love to use it in my own app.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
You want them to open-source a regexp?
- swanson 13y ago
  Sure - a basic version isn't super complicated or anything, but there are a lot of edge cases for various email clients, weird names, etc
philfreo 13y ago
We're using this library: https://github.com/andris9/addressparser https://github.com/andris9/addressparser But we're using it for more than just this scenario. If you're just concerned with this specific case you could come up with a simpler/shorter solution.
- swanson 13y ago
  Thanks - I'll check out that library. I assume you guys use https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck also?
jontas 13y ago
Not sure what language you use, but it almost definitely supports PCRE. For email addresses, I always use this regex: http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html I've yet to run into a problem with it. If you want to extract an address from a larger string, then you need to slightly modify the regex to capture the email address from the string. This is going to depend somewhat on the language you're using, but probably involves wrapping everything between the first \b and the last \b in parentheses. I guess if I were certain that the target text was a "<name>" user@domain.com style string, I probably wouldn't use a regex (unnecessary overhead) and just split on > and trim or something silly like that.

hnriot 13y ago

One suggestion, you have track feature for imap clients, but that will only track emails from people in your contacts list. If you built a list of all the sent/received email addresses and added autocomplete to your input it would help. So I email person@example.com then go to close.io and start to add them to my contacts. As soon as I type per... the autosugest expands to the full email, and of course fills in the name too.

JimWestergren 13y ago

Nice integration of Tumblr. Same header, same design.

10char 13y ago

I wonder if you could do some kind of NLP-based input for contacts. Sort of like what Fantastical/Google Calendar do, maybe with some Graph Search-esque autocomplete to "teach" you the syntax? Along the lines of entering "Phil Freo, Director of Engineering, office phil@close.io, mobile 650-555-1234"

jrochkind1 13y ago

> We already know your email address when you signed up, and we use our own Mailgun account to send email as/from you, so that it just works. Hmm, isn't this asking for trouble? Having the emails you send put in spam queues, or eventually having your MTA IP address blacklisted even. When you're sending out emails from @somewhere.tld, even though you aren't in control of somewhere.tld or it's MX server, and sending out multiple emails from the same mail server. These days, sending email while remaining in the good graces of all the ISPs receiving email is awfully hard. cf http://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/warming_up.html http://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/warming_up.html

philfreo 13y ago
The number of messages we allow per day for accounts without their own SMTP credentials is very low. But yes, this is something we need to keep an eye on.

iamjonlee 13y ago

I don't use close.io, but here's what I'd also recommend if you haven't done them already: 1) allow the user to enter their phone numbers in whatever format they want: 4081231234, (408)123-1234, 408-123-1234 and format it after they click 'save' to (408)123-1234 or however you want it. 2)Cache the domain of the email address for autocomplete suggestions if they enter a website. For example, if you type in phil@close.io for the email, I can already suggest http://close.io http://close.io if you start typing in a website address.

philfreo 13y ago
We already do #1, but #2 is a good suggestion, thanks!
- awj 13y ago
  Bikeshedding on #2, set up a blacklist of very obvious non-business domains. Very few people with @gmail.com or @hotmail.com actually own the business on that domain.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  If you want to make international phone number entry work better, I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about that recently. I've created a draft proposal you're more than welcome to follow up on at https://github.com/mtrimpe/jInternationalPhone https://github.com/mtrimpe/jInternationalPhone
  - philfreo 13y ago
    Interesting... looks promising. Using this would be tough while we share phone/email/urls fields though.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago

I have a very hard time taking any UI advice from a web-site which puts a static bar at the top of the page which you cannot remove. It is like being sent back in time to iFrames and makes using your page with a vertical device horrifying. I actually used the Chrome developer bar to Display: none it away. I guess that is the way you expect your users to use your site? Remove annoying counter-intuitive UI elements by eliminating them...

thomas-st 13y ago
What is the specific problem with the top bar? It goes away for small window sizes.
awj 13y ago
Middlebrow dismissal at its finest. Which is a shame, the article actually has some nice little usability ideas if you could get over yourself.
bryne 13y ago
Let me see if I can get the same tone as your comment: I have a hard time taking any complaint about vertical devices seriously when the page content is responsive and the bar is not static at lower resolutions. Perhaps rotate your monitor the other way if the loss of 69 pixels is causing you such heartburn?

rogerbinns 13y ago

Is there any particular reason you don't just have a multiline text box, and allow anything to be entered/pasted, and then just figure it out? Why should a human have to parse out bits of contact information and separately add each one to your form? (Your computers have billions of cpu cycles, bytes of memory and storage - surely they can do it.) For example I should be able to paste in any block from this page http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/publicrelationscontacts/asia-pacific-public-relations-1377283.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/publicrelationscont... and have it figure out names, email addresses, phone numbers etc.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
Is that a common scenario? I am mostly moving single pieces of information rather than entire blocks of text like you're proposing. If we take your specific example, how would a computer even with "billions of cpu cycles" figure out which piece of information is someone's name and which is their job title? Or which is an address Vs. job title? Sorting data and understanding it is a "hard problem" and relatively speaking computing power plays a very small part of that. What plays a much larger part is just having MASSIVE databases of already sorted data to compare against (e.g. Siri).
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  > Is that a common scenario? I am mostly moving single pieces of information rather than entire blocks of text like you're proposing. You most likely have the information as a single block especially if copying it from somewhere else. And it is certainly far easier if the user has to do one copy and paste versus once per field. In this particular case they have a user sitting there so the answer doesn't have to be perfect every time - they just have to make sure that if the heuristics mess up that it can be corrected (eg let the user drag and drop elements into the right arrangement/field names). > Or which is an address Vs. job title? The former is likely to occur in a geocoding database and the latter isn't. close.io focusses on sales so that immediately narrows down the likely possibilities for contact information. I'd be pretty sure naive code would have an 80% success rate, and analytics plus ongoing development would ensure ever improving success rates.

__david__ 13y ago

> We already know your email address when you signed up, and we use our own Mailgun account to send email as/from you, so that it just works. Unless your domain is setup to use strict SPF and then this will fail randomly (depending on if the recipient checks SPF or not). And do people really give their IMAP credentials to a web app?? I would never dream of doing that. That's the keys to the kingdom, right there...

philfreo 13y ago
> Unless your domain is setup to use strict SPF and then this will fail randomly Sure - but most people don't have this, and the goal is to get people to put in their SMTP credentials at some point anyway. Just doesn't have to be in their very first email. > And do people really give their IMAP credentials to a web app? Yep. We take security seriously and only end up tracking emails that match up with sales/leads in Close.io. For an entire company, their CRM data is often more important than an individual's inbox anyways - and we want to reduce the data entry necessary in common sales processes.

X4 13y ago

If you're at it, why not auto-detect the type of information? Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable, email address and website url are differntiatable too. I would even go so far and add an auto-import feature LinkedIn/Facebook/Google, that searches for the contact's "name(+address)" online and returns the "possible" results into the right fields automatically into your database. ;) @close.io team I don't use SaaS services except GitHub regularly, but if you would sell license your applicatoin I would buy a copy. I believe this is a good strategy when you've already a "satisfieable" amount of customers. But your mileage may vary.

untog 13y ago
Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable They aren't. At least not consistently- the UK (where I suspect you might be given you use of "mobile phone") prefixes them all with 07, but in the US and Canada there is no such difference.
philfreo 13y ago
> Landline and Mobile phone numbers are differentiatable, I'm not sure about this in a world with number portability. > email address and website url are differntiatable too Yep, we do this already. > auto-import feature LinkedIn/Facebook/Google, that searches for the contact's We'd like to pull in social data. It's not trivial, though services like FullContact.com can help.
- X4 13y ago
  wow, I hoped, but didn't expect that someone actually listens to my tiny voice in the vacuum of the great Interspace. :) I honestly do highly appreciate that, it's a really great move by you and I'm grateful that you care about perfecting your product :) Most companies think they cannot afford listening to their users, those who do earn my deep respect. Btw. I'm from Germany and "mobile phones" can be differentiated easily here. Not only that, you'll even know which network the other number is signed up with. D1 T-Mobile: 0151x, 0160, 0170, 0171, 0175 D2 Vodafone: 0152x, 0162, 0172, 0173, 0174 E-Plus: 0157x, 0163, 0177, 0178 O2: 0159x*, 0176, 0179 Locating positions of landlines phone numbers is even easier, because there are databases. The picture in the german wikipedia article explains how the association with a location works (no need to read the entire article). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefonvorwahl http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefonvorwahl But here you can get a free Database containing all landline numbers: http://www.vorwahl-nummern.de/vorwahlen/download.php http://www.vorwahl-nummern.de/vorwahlen/download.php I really enjoy how metadata enriches actual data. Direct link: http://www.access-paradies.de/download/pool/vorwahlen_deutschland.txt http://www.access-paradies.de/download/pool/vorwahlen_deutsc...

nhm 13y ago

On mobile I've become used to phone/email specific keyboards when filling out forms. This idea wouldn't easily allow for that. Then again not enough websites use the input type feature yet anyway, so this is still an interesting improvement.

biot 13y ago

Have you A/B tested the "phone/email in any field" feature and found it results in easier data entry than telling people where to enter that information? I ask as it goes against the principle where giving people less choice can sometimes result in increased conversions. Here, you are asking users to make a choice (albeit, a tiny one) where to enter the information rather than having it consistent every time. Was there clear data which prompted you to implement this format? If so, I'd love to see the testing methodology.