

Someone please build this: Anti-shelving filter for GMail - mortenjust
http://mortenjust.com/2010/03/14/someone-please-build-this-anti-shelving-filter-for-gmail/

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jgrahamc
Funny I had been planning to build something like this. My idea was that you
would forward an email to the service and just type in the start of it when
you want the reminder. Using some simple NLP you'd be able to write something
like "next week" or "on Monday" and the system would then email you back when
it wanted to remind you.

No need to have your gmail password, or even be gmail specific.

Is there anyone out there who would use this? Enough yeses and I'll build it.

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pieter
How would this detect whether you got a reply? Relying on the recipient to
also CC the reminder service seems fragile and ugly, and having to proxy
through another service also seems unwanted (you're now relying on that
service to be available for you to receive email).

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jsnell
That's one of the things that etacts (<http://www.etacts.com>) does. Though
when this was discussed here a few weeks ago in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144560> a lot of people seemed unhappy
about it being an external service that needed to permanently store your gmail
password.

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buro9
I still really want that service. But my gmail controls access to everything
and I cannot overcome the risk associated with divulging my password to a
third party.

No bells and whistles on Gmail is worth risking the security of the email, and
that is precisely what is being asked when we're asked to give our password to
a third party. And there are examples of such abuse of trust, you only have to
look at the court case about Facebook execs using passwords to login to email
accounts of competitors.

So yes, etacts looks wonderful. But it doesn't offer something so compelling
that I would give out my password. It's actually very hard for me to imagine
what could be so compelling that I would give out that password.

~~~
sparky
A valid concern. This prompted them to implement oAuth for GMail, as described
here <http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/gmail-imap-etacts/> and discussed here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172211> .

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billybob
This seems really dysfunctional to me. "The ball is in your court, so I
shouldn't have to do anything else..." and "right now, the person who follows
up is the one who cares most about it." (not exact quotes)

Well, imagine you're on the receiving end, and it's an annoying email that you
don't care to respond to. Do you want to keep getting automated repeats, where
all the pain is yours, or do you want it to be somewhat painful for the person
sending to have to take the time to re-send?

Yes, it's courteous to respond, even if to politely say "not interested, can't
do it, go away." But to be auto-spammed if you don't!?

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smarterchild
You could put that together with this: <http://3mindme.com/>

Say: "I would like an email back about this email in 1 week."

Disadvantages to this:

* Your email goes out to them and gets stored for that long.

* You have to remember to include it as a bcc on every email you care about following up with.

* It doesn't automatically snooze if you get a followup.

* You have no way of tracking responses (in, say, a DB).

But it's a cheap solution that will do the job. Otherwise, there are special
CRM packages for this. Unfortunately, I don't know much about them.

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andrewf
I already do this with five labels, one for each day of the week. A plugin
would be far sexier and save me 10 seconds for each sent email, but the
overhead I have right now is more than worth it.

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apowell
Even better would be to integrate the anti-shelving filter with a GTD app (I
use Things) so that I don't have to create a separate task every time I want
to create a followup reminder.

However, I would never want to send an auto-notification to the receiving
party (often they're my customers -- how rude is that?).

I'd be annoyed if I was on the receiving end of the auto-reminder.

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omrisiri
I had the same idea just last week...

I think it is a great idea given the amount of mail i send and have to deal
with. many times i just forget to make sure i received a reply, and sometimes
when i do its just too late.

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83457
This may even be useful for Google Voice. After hanging up a call have an
option to be notified after a period of time if you haven't received a call
back from the phone number -- or email from that same contact.

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lecha
Those thinking of building something like that should check out
<http://www.clearcontext.com/pro/> that adds this feature in Outlook.

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audionerd
What's wrong with a "follow-up" or "waiting for reply" label?

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83457
"It’s adding to my load what should be in yours."

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christiansj
I could use this please

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mortenjust
spam, how so?

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dbz
Indeed this would be very useful; however, the possibilities for spam are
endless =/

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shrikant
That has to be the WORST lower-case 'f' ever. I had to make sure my laptop
screen wasn't on the fritz.

