
Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal" - mtgentry
http://www.getsmokesignal.com
======
edw519
I appreciate a good hack, but just can't get past the idea that this is a
solution in search of a problem.

2 Reasons I would never consider using this:

1\. I don't want anyone to have any idea "how busy I am". Maybe I'm old
fashioned, but the size of my inbox, like many other things, is no one's
business but mine.

2\. This effectively makes the sender the gatekeeper for deciding what's
important. I want to be my own gatekeeper. I would much rather have everyone
send everything when they would normally send it and let me decide when or
whether to read it. I can't think of any good reason why losing control and
losing data would be advantageous. I'd rather figure out ways to manage my
time and my inbox than wonder what I'm not receiving because someone else made
a decision "on my behalf".

~~~
sixtofour
"I appreciate a good hack, but just can't get past the idea that this is a
solution in search of a problem."

I had exactly the same reaction: good hack, where's the problem?

The solution to the problem of too much email already exists, and that
solution is ... email. Email is asynchronous, and you get to decide when and
what to do with it.

~~~
mtgentry
Overflowing inboxes are the problem. Perhaps we should have provided more
context about what we're trying to fix : )

These guys do a good job: <http://emailcharter.org>

We're trying to provide a framework around that first rule of respecting the
recipient's time.

~~~
avree
But respecting people's time isn't about knowing how much e-mail the person
you're sending to has...

It's about sending only important e-mails/"not spamming". So, regardless of
whether the guy I'm sending to has an empty or an overloaded inbox, I should
always send the e-mail, because it's important.

~~~
hugh3
I don't have an overloaded inbox, but for those who _do_ , it seems to me that
they're mostly overloaded with stuff that was sent to a group rather than to
them as an individual.

If the sender is even thinking about the question "Does this particular
individual have time to read this email?" then the chances are that this email
is already far more important than average.

------
zavulon
The design of the site is very, very good. Within a couple of seconds I knew
EXACTLY what this does. Not usually the case with a lot of startups out there.
That text under the logo is very good.

Having said that, unfortunately I'll join others in saying I won't use this.
I'm one of hte "searchers" - my inbox is always full, but I search for right
emails, instead of filing into folders and deleting.

~~~
bloggergirl
It's true that you know exactly what the service does, zavulon... but
evidently that's only half the battle. You know what it does... but you don't
know WHY you need it. Nobody knows that. Because it's not written on the page;
it's implied. (Never good when your brand and solution are new!)

A part of the problem here comes down not to the service you're providing,
mtgentry, but what you're saying or not saying about it. So my feedback is
about your customer-facing copy.

Although I love the clarity of the headline, I'd recommend you consider
fleshing the headline out to address a key benefit or the single biggest point
of value, possibly in a nicely sized subhead. Something like:

"Broadcast Your Inbox Health

When your team or family sees you're swamped, they'll only send you critical
stuff."

A few other thoughts:

1\. "Broadcast" is a scary word. It's clear and noticeable, but it's scary.
Reconsider?

2\. What's the pain you're eliminating? It's not making it so people are "less
likely to email you", as you put it. We still need communication. It's just
that, when we're busy, we don't want the emails we don't need. The pain you're
eliminating is unnecessary emails. It seems obvious to me, but it's nowhere on
the page. (Of course, I may be totally wrong!)

3\. You write about what senders/recipients can see (i.e., "It allows anyone
you email to see the size of your inbox"), but you don't write about what
people can't see. That's important. The details that stay hidden from others -
like subject lines and sender names - are even more important, in the
sensitive world of personal and business comm, than what's shown to them. Tell
potential customers exactly how private their inbox will remain.

4\. People don't want others to know how jam-packed or empty their inboxes are
because that says something about them. (Others have noted this already.)
Assuming your product addresses this issue elegantly, you'll want to message
this on your home page or in easy-to-read FAQs.

5\. An 'ideal for' line would greatly help. People need to identify. Help
them.

6\. Why is Smoke Signal better than an auto-responder? Why is it better than
IM statuses? Why is it more efficient or effective than the solutions the HN
community is throwing out? A testimonial from a customer that covers off these
sorts of things could do some serious heavy lifting here.

Sorry if that's going too far. It seems to me that there are a lot of great
objections and anxieties rising to the surface in this thread. You can totally
address them easily on the page.

------
FuzzyDunlop
Nice site, clearly written and straight to the point. However I agree with the
sentiment that, if it indeed addresses a problem, it tackles it from the wrong
angle.

The problem this introduces is that it's useless unless people only email you
by replying. If they're replying to you it's probably important, and you don't
want to tell someone not to reply or to reply later. And to expect someone to
do that is unreasonable.

If someone emails you direct, they don't see your signature. So it doesn't
fulfil its purpose then.

Finally, an overflowing inbox shouldn't be the responsibility of someone
trying to contact you. Things like labels, filters and priority flags are all
tools used by email clients to allow the user/recipient to establish a system
to manage large amounts of email that is most suitable for them.

You can't expect the sender to help you manage your time better. And thus if
this servie is useful to you, I'd be more inclined to think your email client
isn't being worked hard enough.

------
puls
Visual nitpicks: your title tag says "SmokeSignal" while the rest of your site
uses "Smoke Signal"; and "all others click here" should probably be "all
others sign up to be notified" or something.

You can probably also safely reduce the number of fonts you're using.

------
benwerd
Isn't this effectively a way to stick a button at the bottom of my emails that
says, "I'M INCREDIBLY DISORGANIZED"?

Now, within teams, I can definitely see the use - particularly if it also
picked up tasks from bug trackers, tools like Remember the Milk, etc. But
maybe as a Rapportive-style dashboard (and at-a-glance team page) rather than
a signature - so when I email my colleague, it warns me that he's late on 3
tasks and has a lot of unread email.

~~~
dpcan
Agreed. If you have nothing in your inbox, it looks like you have nothing
going on, are not successful and are unimportant.

If your inbox is overloaded, then you are unproductive, overwhelmed,
unhelpful, flustered.

If you are in between, it says almost nothing about you and therefore would be
pointless.

I think this was probably a fun little project, but I see absolutely no sense
in it- at least not the way the author intended anyway.

------
snorkel
Despite whether of not I'd use this service I must say your site explains it
very clearly, directly, and in terms anyone can understand so I'd say job well
done.

------
rhplus
There are two huge problems with this service: trust and privacy.

Trust: a one page website is asking for access to my Gmail account. As far as
I can tell, this means it gets access to everything 24/7. EVERYTHING. Holy
crap. Because of the way that web security has evolved, my email inbox (not
Gmail, but that's beside the point) is now the master key to my life. No way
in hell am I handing a service like this the master key to my life.

Privacy: I'm assuming this is inserted into the email as an HTTP reference
("signature updates throughout the day"). If that's the case, then most
correspondents won't see the image because modern email clients block 'beacon'
image requests by default. If that's not the case and the image is embedded as
a MIME object, then the tool is kinda useless, because who knows when a
correspondent will read my reply?

If anything, the real solution is already described in the website header:
"It's kinda like the AWAY setting on instant messenger, but for email". Most
IM software, including Gmail, already has "online presence" notification.
Perhaps that's where the real solution lies.

------
Hitchhiker
They are onto something. Usually great stories start with a narrow, pin-point
of a problem that many people have.

<http://blog.getsmokesignal.com> also shows laser focus, sparse and reflective
pieces.

Their simple refocus on sender is refreshing and quite cunning.

Keep up the good work.

------
huhtenberg
Another take on the same problem is to send an automatic reply saying

    
    
      Your email has been received.
      There are %N emails in my Inbox before yours. 
      Your email is important to me.
      The estimated wait time for the response is %M days.
      Thank you for your patience.
    

:)

~~~
simonsarris
If two people both used that automatic reply, and one of them emailed the
other, it would result in the world's funniest arms race.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Or ARMMs race: <http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html>

------
pbrook
The site looks very nice, and the idea looks interesting. Another small typo:
"Also until we get create a proper login system".

How do you determine what are "healthy" and "unhealthy" amounts of email? If I
ignore a bunch of mailing-list type email in my inbox by just glancing at the
title, I may have hundreds of "unread" messages but that doesn't mean I'm
totally flooded with email. Thoughts?

~~~
mtgentry
Great point. In future versions we may only ping your Priority Inbox, instead
of everything. Would that be a more accurate reflection of your "busyness"?

~~~
periferral
There are a few shortcomings here

Having filters: Most users may use Inbox as the fall through location for
emails. But a lot use filters as a way to move stuff out of the inbox to
specific folders as a means to prioritize responses.

eg. My wife, business partner etc, might make it to folder important, my 2nd
level priority emails go someplace else, mailing lists elsewhere and so on.

Inbox is whats left and is least priority. How do you account for whats
important. What if I don't use priority inbox? What happens when I don't read
the email in my inbox at all since it isn't critical to my day to day
function.

This also doesn't account for a mail client use or mail forwarding from
Google. Since Gmail provides a way to use a mail client or forward mail
options, it means that I might read mail on my client but not report back to
gmail or just read all the mail from another account.

Anyway, some thoughts to ponder over. May not be a mainstream problem since
most users might not be doing what I suggested.

------
ssmoot
The "Learn More" should be on the front-page. Or actually, the image on the
stats should be. To decide on wether I'd use this, I must follow that extra
link, filter some copy I don't care about, then look at the image to figure
out "unbearable" means a puny number to me, making the product a bad fit.

20 emails is far from "unbearable" in my mind.

Also, making it obvious that this is based on _unread_ emails would be
helpful. My immediate reaction was this was for zero-inbox-nazis, of which I
know a few among friends, but the "unbearable mental weight" of seeing a list
of read emails just doesn't impact me the way it does them I guess. ;-)

Other than that, yes, clever hack. But honestly I'd be afraid of the
impression I'm making by broadcasting to everyone that I'm constantly swamped.
"Unbearable" has some pretty overly dramatic connotations.

------
ravloony
I have one rather large gripe : The sentence "We use Oauth to look at the
amount email in your inbox, nothing else." is _immediately_ followed by "Also
until we get create a proper login system, we may use OAuth to get your email
address".

I understand that this is a temporary situation, but you probably shouldn't
say "nothing else" and immediately deny it.

Otherwise, the idea is cute, and the site is nice. However, I have a feeling
that people won't want to broadcast that much information to just anyone. It's
a little like adding "my desk is really untidy (or tidy, or whatever) right
now" as an email signature.

------
helen842000
I love looking at new sites like this, I think it's great to get the chance to
see what others are working on. It tries to tackle an important problem but
has a few forseeable side effects.

The most important points I can think of...

It's placed in the signature, it doesn't apply to anyone composing a new
message, which is probably a large portion of mail.

It relies on the person sending the message to decide if their e-mail is
urgent or not (everyone thinks THEIR message is urgent)

Anyone replying to your mail is probably someone you are waiting for a
response from, so really you NEED them to e-mail you, so you can get work
done.

It would probably lead to a lot of 'queue jumping', getting phone calls
starting "I saw your mailbox is swamped so I thought I'd just call to ask
XYZ..."

I do love that it auto updates so that you can see the current status even on
an old mail.

Maybe it would be more useful to display an auto updating sig beacon that
contains autoresponder info. Your frequent contacts can see what you're up to,
if you're about, at a different site, on hol etc. That's closer to the "Away"
button on messenger. It would save people typing out a whole e-mail to just
get a bounceback message.

------
ryanlelek
I wouldn't use it, but the site (which is the thing you wanted us to focus on)
is clear and original. Overall, well done.

There might be a typographical error in the Privacy section: "We use Oauth to
look at the amount ( _of?_ ) email in your inbox, nothing else."

(I don't mean to nitpick, but we want your site to be the best it can be!)

------
tgrass
This provides a greater benefit to the recipient than the sender.

Jack wants to send Jill an email and using SmokeSignal can send it when there
is the least noise in Jill's inbox. SmokeSignal is a utility for him not her.
Devise a way to implement/market SmokeSignal to Jack, in which he persuades
Jill to use it.

~~~
mtgentry
Well, the product assumes Jill is really hot. And she gets lots of email from
not only Jack, but Tom, Dick & Harry as well.

We think Jill would want to use it to decrease the number of cock pics in her
inbox.

------
DanBC
Good Luck!

There's a little typo - _"We use Oauth to look at the amount email in your
inbox, nothing else."_ \- missing OF after amount.

On the learn more page there's an extra apostrophe - "email signature that
let's other"

It looks really neat. How do you deal with "out of office" situations, where
people are likely to have full inboxes?

~~~
mtgentry
Ha, I'm sure there are other typos as well!

If someone gets a full inbox while on vacation, I'm guessing they would still
want others to know their inbox is full, no?

~~~
dmbass
Well, you would probably want the person to know you are out of office/on
vacation/not checking email, not that you have a full inbox.

------
tobylane
This favours people who check emails all the time (24/7 if you get
international emails), and says nothing of those who read all their emails,
then goes through all the work created by them, then repeat (as my mum does
all day).

------
buzzedword
Honestly, I like this service. While I agree with everyone's sentiments as to
it addressing a problem but not fixing it, I believe it's a great alternative.
There's not a "one size fits all" solution to email overload, and this allows
a user another channel to express their availability.

I would only suggest allowing a user to set their own alert levels for each
category-- my emails constantly go upwards of 100, 200, 300 unread at a time,
but I still consider that manageable. Allow it to be customized and you have
an interesting project that has some great potential.

------
utunga
This is just a trick to be able to build some sort of social network graph
based on 'reads' of email isn't it?

Nice use of google/gmail api nevertheless.

I installed it to see if it works/because it looks fun but will probably
uninstall it tomorrow when i start freaking out about the privacy/security/my-
outgoing-emails-being-blocked implications.

Also it said my inbox is 'unbearable' straight off the bat so presumably you
just check total unread or total inbox messages not the ratio - I have a
massive inbox but no recent messages that are not read right now so I feel
it's very 'bearable'.

------
mikesaraf
I think this is really clever, I love it!

2 Suggestions: 1\. A way to control which emails this gets attached to. If I'm
emailing a client, I don't want them to ever feel I'm too busy to be
contacted. 2\. Allow for other measurements. In the same way most phones have
a DND button, I would be great to have a manual override for days I'm busy.
Also for me it would make more sense to measure how busy my calendar is vs my
inbox.

Additional variation: It might be interesting to post an average response time
to expect vs ples/tol/unb.

~~~
mnutt
I believe that in GMail, when you compose a new message your signature is just
at the bottom and you can select and delete it.

------
Dylan16807
I can't say much about the service; I wouldn't use it having little email use.
But the site itself is broken and severely overlapping for me, even when
zoomed out. (mobile opera)

~~~
mguarascio
This is a completely serious question: does mobile opera have a large enough
user base to include support for at the MVP stage?

------
donohoe
I would love the ability to set the basic colors - specifically background
color (including transparent).

For now at least, I find it more useful embedded on my site than in email.

------
larsj45
Very nice, but is it customizable? Could I set it up myself to say that I'm
busy now, and probably won't be able to reply soon, regardless of the amount
of e-mail I have in my inbox? Or maybe could it somehow relate to the how many
e-mails I have sent/read in the past few hours to understand if I've been
going through them? Like "he has been to his inbox for x hours now, so please
don't expect a quick answer right now..."

------
simplegeek
Great design and bravo for actually shipping code. But I don't think I would
use it because there are definitely more than 7000 emails in my inbox but I
always reply emails immediately that I know are important. What if I include
some key-phrase in signature and people who send me emails with that key-
phrase in subject are more likely to get a quick reply? But this is a
deviation from your original idea.

~~~
mtgentry
As mentioned in another thread, maybe there could be an algorithm that uses
multiple data points to determine availability? So it would take into account
that you haven't opened that 5,345th email from a year ago, and you're
unlikely to any time soon.

------
sunahsuh
My friend Eric's courteous.ly (featured on lifehacker and mashable a few
months back) does something similar except it uses rolling data points to
determine what "normal" is for you, as opposed to a single absolute scale for
everyone. The advantage of Smoke Signal is that it has a real-time meter as
opposed to making a recipient click on a link to get the status of your inbox.

~~~
mtgentry
I actually reached out to Eric about the idea originally but didn't hear back,
so we just went ahead and built it on our own : ) The only thing I'm not crazy
about w/ coutreous.ly is the stats live outside email ecosystem.

Buster Benson is doing cool things too with <http://howsmyemail.com>. He
provided some encouragement early on.

------
lr
What does "size of your inbox" mean? I have over 22K messages in my inbox,
does that mean I am too busy? I don't use my inbox as a "to do list," so I
really don't care how many messages are in it. But, apparently, there are a
lot of people who do. Regardless, I think it is totally cool you guys wrote an
app that you think is useful and that you shared it with HN!

------
arkitaip
I get the feeling that this is a MVP or feature test for something bigger.
Because truth be told, I don't see why people would care about someone's inbox
health, especially since people use their Gmail account as a garbage dump+todo
list+backup. I've seen inboxes with THOUSANDS of unread email and most people
I know don't archive anything at all.

~~~
rhizome
_I've seen inboxes with THOUSANDS of unread email_

This is me, for years.

~~~
mtgentry
Maybe the solution to this is an algorithm that pings multiple data points to
determine your availability.

~~~
900
You mean like this one?

<http://www.wuphf.com/>

------
pdenya
Cool idea but I tend to glance through every email as it comes in and either
respond, do nothing or mark them for a later action (flagging, etc) so it
doesn't quite fit into my workflow.

On the other end of this, there are definitely times where I've wondered how
busy someone I'm emailing was. I'd enjoy being able to quickly gauge their
status.

------
ang3lfir3
I must be a truly mean person. My first thought was "I can know when I have
spammed them exactly enough"... I think I would personally make a game out of
trying to keep people's inbox completely full. Like I said... I'm prolly just
a mean spirited person.

------
zwass
The chances of me typing my Gmail password into a page with that many typos
are extremely low.

------
MichaelApproved
I think this got a lot of attention because a lot of people here have a ton of
email but ultimately this doesn't seem like a solution to that problem.

------
timjahn
I'm curious. Out of the total amount of people you surveyed before building
this, what percentage raised their hands and said they would use it?

~~~
mtgentry
We're counting hands now on HN. It's very much a MVP.

~~~
noveltyaccount
What does MVP mean in this context?

------
muxxa
I'd find this useful if it would update my IM status rather than adding a
postscript to outgoing emails.

------
Geee
Completely unrelated, but how does that Museo Sans render so nicely on
Win/Chrome? Usually font rendering on Chrome is horrible. Now, checking
Typekit, it seems some fonts have nice anti-alias, while some not. Where's the
difference?

~~~
joshuacc
I believe that is due to the work they explain in this blog post:
[http://blog.typekit.com/2011/07/26/new-from-typekit-
improved...](http://blog.typekit.com/2011/07/26/new-from-typekit-improved-
font-rendering-on-windows/)

~~~
eps
This and the fact that Jos, the Museo designer, has always been _very_ web-
oriented and paid a lot of attention to the rasterization issues. His fonts
are all really well hinted to begin with, and then there is Typekit's
conditional .ps serving on top of that.

------
dwynings
I'd pay just to have it always say: my inbox is unbearable.

~~~
mtgentry
Haha. The problem with this is people would get used to it always being
unbearable. And they they would't trust it.

------
dmitrisleonov
Solid work guys, I'm in

------
dreww
i like the site. i would prefer a more passive indicator, that indicates my
status in a less strident tone.

