

Find the best path to any person or company - alexeichemenda
http://www.conspire.com

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tarikjn
Would love to try this, but allowing access to all mail on my account is a
deal breaker. The "It all takes just a few clicks. We never have access to
your password." isn't enough for me to go past that fact -- who needs your
password when you have all the emails now and in the future! (not to mention
write emails on your behalf). I did check the FAQ, and although it does assure
the reader only the headers are accessed, this is not enough.

I would use this only if the Google authorization checklist actually says this
only access email headers, and then I would like to be able to limit the past
time period of email accessed, and not give ongoing access.

~~~
nowarninglabel
Yeah, I feel the same way, even though I know one of the guys working on this.
That said, I do think they have a great product, just wish there was a better
way for them to get the information without needing all those permissions.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Could they write a small imap application that dumped the headers into simple
json or what have you that we could then verify before submitting? I know it's
not exactly user friendly, but it would make the people that care about
security a lot happier.

~~~
nowarninglabel
They wrote up some info on an alternative today:
[http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-
usin...](http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-using-the-
gmail-api-yet)

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blergh123
I was excited - but stopped the sign up process as soon as I saw it was asking
to access all my email. Definitely a deal breaker.

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ozh
I totally want to trust a brand new stuff named "conspire" and let them read
all my emails including super sensitive stuff.

Seriously, this looks like an XKCD prank comic gone real.

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dreamfactory2
So a site called 'conspire' assumes my mail is all in gmail and wants access
to it so I can surveil the contacts of people I exchange messages with and
their extended networks in turn? You couldn't make this up really. It seems
more ethical and less creepy to hire private detectives at this point.

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loucal
Accessing all my mail is a tough sell but allowing you to delete and send
email on my behalf requires a lot more trust than you have built up thus far.
That isn't to say I don't think this looks really cool and like a good idea,
but that I am disappointed I can't try it out.

Can anyone from conspire comment on why it needs more than read-only access to
your mail? From reading the privacy policy I gather that the reason might be
because they are trying to actually protect people's privacy by not sharing
the email address of the person they are emailing on your behalf. I'm not sure
though, and if it is actually sending an email from an account that you own I
don't see how they can hide that from you. They could delete the sent message
to do a basic cover up but (I think) anyone who really wanted to know could
probably find out the last email that was sent from their account. Then again
if the messages are sent using their service as a middleman (more likely imho)
then I'm still stumped as to why they need more than 'read only' access to my
email.

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torkable
Yea I'll just let this website I've never heard of access to my email data!

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pauljm
Paul, Conspire co-founder and CTO, here. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

I understand granting "manage my email" access is a big step. Unfortunately,
Gmail/Google Apps IMAP access is currently all-or-nothing. All we need to
understand the network is read-only access to message headers--not including
subject line--but we're forced to ask for everything.

The new Gmail API,
[https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/](https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/),
adds a read-only (but not a read-only-headers) permission. We're looking
forward to making the switch, but right now the performance difference between
the Gmail API and plain IMAP is prohibitive. More on that here:
[http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-
usin...](http://blog.conspire.com/post/100016691078/why-we-arent-using-the-
gmail-api-yet).

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Paul, while we have you here, a question: The obvious trope is that we are the
product, that somehow Conspire will make money "off our backs".

I think it might alleviate some concerns if you shared at least some notion of
how you intend to monetize, e.g., selling anonymized marketing data, and,
perhaps more importantly, how you will NOT monetize, e.g., never offering
"recruiter" plans where folks get access to our stuff for a fee.

You don't have to say what you will do, but knowing what you will NOT do may
allay concerns.

Thanks!

~~~
alexdevkar
Other Conspire founder here.

We will not spam your contacts, sell your or your contacts' email addresses or
personal data, or otherwise sell data about you to third parties.

Down the road, we will offer premium plans with professional search tools. An
example use case is if you want to reach CIOs in northern California at
companies greater than 100 people, we will identify those people and tell you
the best person in your network to ask for an intro. At the moment, we're
focused on growing the size of the network and making it valuable for users.

One other subtle point I wanted to mention: We don't expose email addresses
via the product. The only people you can email are those for which you already
have an email address. The same is true for people trying to contact you. So
you won't get a bunch of spam recruiter emails.

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owens99
This is great, the biggest weakness is there it's based on gmail so the value
is limited unless one's entire network is on the service. If this was based on
Twitter, all the data on who follows who is public and there's more immediate
value. I regularly use methods like this for business development.

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mathattack
Ummm... Letting a service called Conspire manage my email???? It appears that
people are letting this happen though.

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ehurrell
Seems very similar to Datahug, how is it different/better? While both services
offer something compelling they both want full access to emails which isn't
exactly necessary, I've done something similar looking at LinkedIn data.

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th0br0
uhm... why does the faq page explain IMAP access when the product's using
Google's EMail API? Also, "extended network" is not defined.

OTOH, nice project and blissfully simple!

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petervandijck
Building a network graph of who emails who, and using that to drive
introductions/sales - I like it. Especially because of the network effects.

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TenJack
"View and manage your mail" permission is a deal breaker for me as well. Why
is this a requirement?

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codingmarketer
Love the SVG animation that was done on the background of the landing page!!
neat!

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SomeCallMeTim
Very cool idea, and welcome to Boulder!

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jasjitsingh85
this is the most incredible service I've seen on HN. Very nice work to the
guys behind this. awesome

