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Show HN: Signal – Edit emails in your Gmail inbox
- Avalaxy 13y agoStrange. When I open gmail, I have to give permission. I do that, dismiss the dialog, the page refreshes, and I get the same dialog. Over and over again, I think I've given the app my permission like 10 times. And the buttons aren't appearing in my gmail. What am I doing wrong?
- gsundeep 13y agoHi there - if you're willing to help us debug your issue, shoot us an email at team@trysignal.com and we'll send you some instructions to get that sorted out asap.
- chunky1994 13y agoCool concept, lets see where it'll go!
- canistr 13y agoI like the idea of re-naming these as a form of mini-notes. But now that Gmail is getting into providing context for emails (such as flight check-ins), I'd like it if the auto-generated emails could also learn based on summaries I provide. Kind of like a filter rule based on what I've done in the past to re-name the email to what I'm looking for.
- tehwebguy 13y agoThis is such a great idea. Like if you could somehow turn the massive emails chocked full of garbage from airlines into something that just says: MCO > JFK 9/18 1:00 PM EFZG94
- finnh 13y ago... and that's why i use tripit
- jedberg 13y agoTripit has saved me so much time (and helped my marriage too) by solving this problem. I just started using it this summer when I was doing a lot of international travel. Now, I just forward the email to tripit and I have an item in my calendar (that is shared with my wife) that has just the relevant info (flight time, number, conf #, etc) so I can see it any time and so can she. No more looking at those awful emails (which I just archive as soon as I forward it).
- Sulfolobus 13y agoI'm a big fan of the Google Now cards that pop-up with live flight details and information like when I have to leave in order to get to check-in on time with current travel conditions. It seems to be getting this straight from my gmail account.
- phalanx101 13y agoI love this idea. I'd love it even more if they had an API and I could pull my todo list into my terminal.
- kartikt 13y agoOne of our goals is to present you the same information on your phones so having the API is definitely part of the plan!
- gsundeep 13y agoThis is where we see Signal moving forward - automatically summarizing emails based on your previous editing patterns.
- canistr 13y agoI was thinking of filter controls a la gmail style where I can automatically put things into folders or archive/whatever. More control directly in the hands of the user but still allowing your algorithms to do the heavy lifting.
- mdork 13y agoawesome! def like what i see so far!
- jtth 13y agoNow you have two problems.
- kirbyk 13y ago2 problems?
- phalanx101 13y ago99 problems, son
- Fuzzwah 13y agoI love the idea, but I'm guessing that this extension stores your edits on the local machine you're using at the time? I jump from computer to computer and something like this would only really be helpful for me if my edits followed me around. Possible?
- glifchits 13y agoProbably already a thing with Chrome sync?
- gsundeep 13y agoActually, your edits are synced across all your computers where Signal is installed.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWhat data store are you using then?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- drags 13y agoWhy does it need to access my data on all websites? Shouldn't it only need access to mail.google.com? Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.
- taylorbuley 13y agoLack of priority inbox support is a deal killer for me. Is usage of Prio Inbox not common?
- kartikt 13y agoHey Taylor, we are constantly adding features and fixes to Signal. When we say that priority inbox isn't supported, we only refer to the edits being reflected on the inbox screen. The interface works like normal on the email itself. The preview features for priority inbox should be up in the next few days!
- kirbyk 13y agoIf you guys are storing this data in Firebase, then the next logical step is a native mobile app, likely iOS. What's the timeframe for such?
- gsundeep 13y agoThe iOS app is already in development, we're planning to launch it before January.
- phalanx101 13y agoAny plans for a Windows Phone app? I could see an idea like this doing really well on a platform designed for productive people.
- oliversong 13y agoMesses with keyboard shortcut workflow :(
- kartikt 13y agoWe tried experimenting with having it always be on auto-edit mode (assumed most people don't heavily rely on shortcuts) so we definitely understand that this will interrupt your flow as a power gmail user. We will be pushing the feature to disable auto-edit in the next few days and I'd be more than happy to comment here when it's out :)
- agrona 13y agoPlease do. I was hoping to find an option to turn it off.
- robertnealan 13y agoAs an initial concept it's interesting but not very useful for most people in it's current state as it ultimately requires me to spend more time in my inbox. I think the real potential is in your "Coming Soon" feature, where it will hopefully be able to automatically figure out the best subject lines for me and save me time in the long run. Ultimately, it'd be great if it could decipher whether or not the email can be answered with a simple answer (yes/no, a time/date, etc), and provide the buttons to respond to it without ever actually opening up the email itself. As far as the site itself goes - it has a clean, simple to understand interface lacks anything sexy to sell the idea. The animation is a great idea, but just seems dry and lacks context. Looking at the "Using Signal" page (https://trysignal.com/using-signal/ https://trysignal.com/using-signal/), I'd say use a screenshot similar to the one there (albeit with the full inbox visible), and show an animation of the email being edited in real time rather than the side by side comparison. That would be a much clearer demonstration and immediately provide the context as to what's happening. In all reality you could just integrate the "Using Signal" page into the main index for the moment as it doesn't have enough information to really constitute a secondary page.
- kartikt 13y agoThe button concept you describe is very interesting - we have been playing around with NLP for extracting actionable items from email, but we want to make sure it’s accurate before we launch any features that rely on it. Thanks for the feedback on the website, we’re definitely be changing it up in the coming weeks.
- udfalkso 13y agoIs the original email accessible somewhere after I create my edited version?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kartikt 13y agoOf course! Once you edit the email you can click on the 'Restore' button (visible inside the email) to display the original and toggle to your changes again by clicking 'Revert'
- jonperl 13y agoGreat application! One bug I noticed is that when I mark a message as unread, the subject line / summary text goes back to what it used to be. Maybe you guys could have an empty repo on GitHub to keep track of bugs?
- kartikt 13y agoExcellent idea! We just created one: https://github.com/TrySignal/Support https://github.com/TrySignal/Support
- ape4 13y agoI do this with Thunderbird (IMAP access to gmail) and the Header Tools Lite plugin. Works for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-tools-lite/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-to...
- aroman 13y agoThis is a fantastic concept, but I will never use it because I don't use Chrome and I don't like the idea of my inbox being different on each device I use. I'll just wait for Google to either ripoff the idea or (hopefully) acquihire the company and integrate it into Gmail itself. Really the idea that the message preview is the FIRST two lines is comically absurd, especially for a company like Google. It's actually amazing to me nobody has done this yet.
- gsundeep 13y agoWe're actually testing Signal on Safari/FF as the majority of the codebase is the same. They should be out in the coming weeks.
- pieterhg 13y agoI like this a lot but moving back from message to inbox now takes an extra second with the extension enabled.
- kartikt 13y agoThanks for reporting this. We are already working on adding a fix to this. It should be handled in the next few days
- nemothekid 13y agoUnrelated - pretty surreal to see my relatively small hometown used in an example.
- lwf 13y agoClassy address in the MailChimp email, but I'm not sure this is CAN-SPAM compliant: Signal Starbucks San Francisco, CA 94100
- mrcactu5 13y agoThis is a good start. I am hesistant to share my Gmail info with any app. on the other hand Gmail itself (as in the client) is clearly reading my mail
- rcthompson 13y agoWhat is this actually doing? I.e. are the emails being edited on the server or is the extension storing a set of edits and applying them when you view the edited emails in Gmail in Chrome? Are the original emails still accessible? How?
- readme 13y agoOP, please deliver. It is super important to me that the original emails are preserved somewhere. Is this so?
- brownBananas 13y agoNot OP, but to answer your question - yes, the original emails are preserved. More info: https://trysignal.com/using-signal/ https://trysignal.com/using-signal/
- gsundeep 13y agoWe are storing the changes you make to an email and then loading those changes back in when you view that email. The original email is never deleted, you can always click the "Restore" button get back to the original.
- btn 13y agoStoring them where?
- coherentpony 13y agoIt's not immediately clear to me what problem this is solving.
- gsundeep 13y agoA lot of people use their inbox as their todo list, but there's a lot of noise in their emails that they have to parse through every time they check their inbox. Signal currently allows you to edit the emails in your inbox so you can get rid of irrelevant info (or even add info) as you see fit. We're experimenting with auto summarization (check out the website for an example). The goal is to make the inbox a better to-do list.
- coherentpony 13y agoYeah, I've used it before. It's pretty cool. I wish the equation stuff was a little more flexible.
- dan-g 13y agoI may have missed this, but do you offer any sort of revision control? Don't want to accidentally delete something important.
- gsundeep 13y agoWe don't have any kind of version control, but we do allow you to flip back and forth between the original and edited emails. We never delete the original copy of the email so you'll never have to worry about accidentally deleting important content.
- k_bx 13y agoOfftopic: the feature I lack is to permanently add some info (like tags) so that email is searchable by some keywords, but I guess that's harder to make (and should be done on gmail side).
- stevenae 13y agoDoes Gmail labels fall short of your need?
- k_bx 13y agoI don't think so. Maybe if I'd need it much more, I could somehow come up with greasemonkeying UI to use labels for this, but currently I think labels are more like folders.
- tsm 13y agoAn email can have multiple labels. And labels can be nested. They really are glorified tags.
- giantSlayer 13y agoYeah! I link it now. We can organized the emails very well now.
- benatkin 13y agoThis is not seamless. I don't need to try it to find that out, I just have seen this type of extension enough times to know that it isn't seamless, especially in beta form.
- brownBananas 13y agoSeamless in which sense? Across different devices, mail services, accounts, etc?
- tnorthcutt 13y agoSeems to open emails in "editing" mode by default. I filed an issue on Github.
- gsundeep 13y agoThanks for doing so - we're adding a settings pane where you can turn off the auto-edit functionality. I'll update the gh issue once it's live.
- Imagenuity 13y agoThis is the one thing that has kept me from completely switching to Gmail. However, since these edits are not actually written back to the email, but stored locally (even synced with Signal on other machines), it does no good since the Gmail app on my Android phone and tablet can't see the changes. BE VERY CLEAR you're just editing and storing locally. The original Gmail message unchanged. I combined two emails, deleted one of them, and checked it in the Gmail app. All I see is the original message, but other other is deleted. This will just confuse most people. Unless this can change the message on Gmail, it is useless to me.
- aleem 13y agoI'll share an even better approach that works across all devices, allows better todo management and allows you to preserve the original email context. The first thing you need to know is that an email sent to username+anything@gmail.com is the same as sending it to username@gmail.com. Knowing that you can send all your notes to username+todo@gmail.com and then create a filter to attach a Yellow "TODO" label for any such emails received. You can send yourself reminders from anywhere. You may want to add your "todo" in your address book for convenience. You can also reply to any email that needs attention and change the recipient to username+todo@gmail.com. If you add a short summary in the first line of the body, it will show in your inbox preview. That email will sit in your inbox vying for your attention and when you open it, you can always refer to the original thread. It's also possible to expand this idea further. For example, you can reply to an existing todo email and add more details. You can also keep a draft email within the same thread where you have rough notes. I have drafts that are a year old attached to todo items. You can mark items complete fairly easily as well. You should have GMail keyboard shortcuts enabled if you don't already. On a related note, you can also sync your iPhone notes to keep them on GMail. That works out nicely as you always have them backed up online and you can have read-only access to them from anywhere through your GMail account. I haven't needed anything more for my todo management.
- pain_perdu 13y agoThere is a HUGE branding problem here. A few weeks ago, Hubspot launched their gmail add-on product called Signals. Now this company has launched their gmail add-on product called Signal. The products are way too similar to avoid user confusion. See http://www.getsignals.com/ http://www.getsignals.com/ vs https://trysignal.com/ https://trysignal.com/
- ck2 13y agoFind a way to give back the old compose message box, charge $1 to buy the feature and you'll be a millionaire in a week.
- Beltiras 13y agoYeah, just what I need. More American corporations with access to my data ......
- shishir1 13y agoIt expands the first conversation for an email conversation. This change in default settings (Gmail by default expands the latest message) is very painful! I un-installed it after 1 hour of usage...
- namanbharadwaj 13y agoThis interferes with my GMail keyboard shortcuts (presumably because editing mode is on by default when I open an email). There should be some kind of option to make editing mode off by default. Or am I missing something?
- hansbbans 13y agois there anyone to set the default mode to edit as opposed to have it default to editing?
- brads84 13y agoOff Topic: How do you guys make that awesome gif video on the homepage without making the file size too large?
- brads84 13y agoNM, isn't a gif after all.