
FWD:Everyone - petethomas
https://fwdeveryone.com/
======
Alex3917
Thanks for submitting this, I was surprised to load HN and see it here. I've
been meaning to do a proper update on what we've been up to for a while, but
basically things that we've done since launching:

\- 99%+ of non-commercial email threads now parse correctly, better than Gmail
in most cases. E.g. check out the inline reply parsing here:
[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-
po...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/Gb8CYKvGS6uFSXdb_hwiTA/blog-post-
feedback-icos-cancer)

\- We now support oEmbed, so you can embed email directly within Reddit and
Medium posts. And also within Confluence, your own site / blog, and hundreds
of other places. C.f.:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_wor...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/87a7my/restaurants_worth_traveling_to_in_the_bronx/)

\- The site now works really well on mobile and tablet.

\- We've added organizations. Organizations can have public and private
repositories. When publishing email to a public repository, by default
permission request emails only go out to non-members of the organization. (And
permission is never required to publish stuff to a private repository.)

\- You can now anonymize any message contributor. Anonymized message
contributors don't receive permission requests. Users can later anonymize or
de-anonymize themselves at any point. (This works even if message contributors
haven't yet created an account.)

\- Threads are now SEO optimized. We basically take all the incoming garbage
HTML that is modern email, and output it as really clean and minimalist HTML.
(This also ensures that the redaction feature never breaks.)

\- We now have pretty decent video tutorials:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjI...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwh9TJWoG6k&list=PLJAEYmnEjIu4
--bpq5LSKZ9LS44po_NUx)

\- Users and organizations now have RSS feeds of their email, e.g.:
[https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex391...](https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex3917)

\- Lots of recirc features, e.g. trending threads.

New features in the pipeline:

\- Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we
required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there
will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize
themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate
this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment.

\- The front end is being completely re-written in React. Right now the front
end loads in about 800ms, we're hoping to get it down to half that or less.
(In comparison, the oEmbed loads in 80 - 130ms, hard to get much better
without changing the speed of light.)

\- We're building a Gmail plug-in. This will allow people to publish directly
from their Gmail, and it won't require read-only access to the user's entire
inbox. (Even though our privacy policy is very good!)

When we built the site we knew that no one needs or is looking for a new
social network, so we figured that we aren't going to get many sign ups until
people have read at least 100 really good threads on the site. We're not quite
there yet, in terms of having enough content and traction for this to be a
real business yet, but we're trending in the right direction and I'm hopeful
we'll be close by the end of the year.

But yeah, overall we're basically just trying to make the Internet fun and
weird again, the way I remember it when I was a kid but with a more modern
twist. And also a real business model, no BS advertising, ever.

Also, for all the stuff that gets published about how addictive social
networks are, try actually building one; nothing is more addictive (or
inspiring) than a blank page.

~~~
larkeith
One thing you almost certainly want to change is the site's behavior with
Javascript disabled - right now, it just shows a white screen with the text
"Loading FWD:Everyone".

It's a bit of a pet peeve for me to see pages like this that are primarily
static but are not accessible without JS, but I can understand that making a
page built with a JS frontend work without it might be more work than it's
worth, at least for an early stage project.

However, you really should put up _some_ sort of notice to users - while being
able to read a short blurb about what the site is nice, even just
"<noscript>This site requires Javascript to view.</noscript>" is better than a
blank page or permanent loading screen.

~~~
Alex3917
Good suggestion on the noscript.

There is actually a bunch of animation and interactivity on the site though.
E.g. if you click on anyone in a thread, you see their bio and their other
threads. And when you hover over a user’s popsicle stick on the newsfeed it
pops up, which is stupid but oddly satisfying... We tried to give it the feel
of popping bubble wrap.

Anyway prerendering more stuff is on our roadmap, so once that’s set up we can
reevaluate.

~~~
angersock
It's called CSS3 mate.

------
yellowapple
I'm sorry, but the idea of a product designed specifically to facilitate the
mass redistribution of communications normally assumed to be private by
default is deeply disturbing. Do I need to start including EULAs in every
email I send? In what multiverse is this sort of thing okay?

Unless permission requests are mandatory and forever will be (regardless of
anonymization), I will automatically refuse to communicate via email (and
possibly any other implied-private medium, including one-to-one chats, mail,
and SMS) with anyone I know to be using this service; instead, the only
communications from me with these people will be through systems/services in
which communications are already assumed to be public or shared (e.g. forums,
mailing lists, public social media posts, blog posts / webpages, etc.).
Likewise, I will never use this service myself; there are plenty of services
out there that facilitate public-record written electronic communication while
being upfront about it.

To reiterate: my emails to others should be considered private between myself
and the recipient unless both of us explicitly consent to their publication,
anonymized or otherwise. That's basic fucking courtesy - courtesy which
FWD:Everyone seems to be explicitly designed to violate.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
It requires opt-in from all participants in the conversation, as Alex posted
down this thread last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401425)

> _We actually currently require double opt-in permission for each message
> contributor in a thread to share stuff publicly. That might change in the
> future, we 're still playing around with the model._

And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose.

~~~
yellowapple
Per Alex's comment on _this_ post (and, in fact, the current top comment):

"Permission requests are becoming optional, at least for now. Previously we
required permission for all non-anonymized message contributors, now there
will be an option to publish stuff immediately and let people anonymize
themselves later if they want. If this is excessively abused we'll re-evaluate
this, but we've tried to build things to incentivize good judgment."

It requires opt-in from all parties _now_ , but there's already a publicized
plan to change that.

"And yes, it does violate basic expectations - that's on purpose."

I'm not sure how "don't worry guys, we're _intentionally_ building a product
to facilitate the wholesale violation of decades-old email etiquette and
common courtesy" is supposed to make this idea sound any less horrific.

~~~
Alex3917
So just to clarify, we're changing the product to make it _possible_ to upload
stuff without permission, but we're not trying to induce bad behavior.

E.g. Gmail has a reply all button and a forward button, but they don't
encourage users to abuse them. They're just there for situations where it's
(hopefully) appropriate, and they trust users to exercise good judgment. And
for the most part it works, since there are only so many times you can abuse
those features before people stop sending you emails.

There are many times when it's easy to get verbal permission from someone, but
difficult or impossible to get email permission, e.g. if their email address
has changed.

~~~
yellowapple
"Gmail has a reply all button and a forward button"

Last I checked, neither of those buttons are designed to publish the whole
conversation to the whole world via the World Wide Web. Your product is.
Therefore:

"we're changing the product to make it possible to upload stuff without
permission"

Then you're changing the product in a way that is absolutely unacceptable for
privacy reasons.

"we're not trying to induce bad behavior"

I'm not trying to induce meth addiction; I'm just selling it and hoping it
won't be abused.

"And for the most part it works, since there are only so many times you can
abuse those features before people stop sending you emails."

Then you're missing the point: I want to minimize the potential for abuse to
ever happen in the first place. Hence the ultimatum in my top-level comment:
if I know someone is using this service, then I'm going to refuse to
communicate with that person via implicitly/semantically-private channels (in
fact, it'd be nice if there were some way to programmatically get a list of
email addresses registered with this service so I can maintain a blacklist on
my SMTP servers and prevent myself from sending anything to them by accident).
I _might_ waver from that if FWD:Everyone offers the ability to preemptively
register my email address(es) in an "automatically deny permission" list.

"There are many times when it's easy to get verbal permission from someone,
but difficult or impossible to get email permission, e.g. if their email
address has changed."

Then that request for verbal permission should be along the lines of "hey, I
want to post our conversation from a while back to FWD:Everyone; do you mind
logging in real quick and approving it since the request probably went to your
old email?". Even better if FWD:Everyone would keep track of who owns what
emails and send requests to alternate emails if not approved in a certain
amount of time.

Otherwise, tough beans. Just because Disney didn't respond to my email asking
for permission to sell bootleg copies of Frozen on the black market (e.g.
because I sent it to the wrong address or because it's obviously going to be a
"no") doesn't mean I'm automatically allowed to do so.

In other words: if I'm unable to provide consent, then assume that I do not
consent. Inconvenient, sure, but that ain't my problem.

------
jeswin
Sync my inbox? So basically, if you get hacked, all my emails are public. Or
at the very least, an untrusted third party (you) gets to read everyone's
private email?

No way I'll use it, nor allow anyone else I know to do so.

~~~
momentmaker
I feel like this would be a good use case to use blockchain where the code
would be public and your email messages could be encrypted.

~~~
ajhurliman
There was an IOTA "random" wallet generator where they posted the codebase
online, but they had additional code on the page that made the range of
generated wallets really narrow. The owner eventually robbed everyone.

I'd still be skeptical.

------
2ion
> * Less work than blogging, way more benefits > > * Build a community around
> your inbox > > * Only share the emails you intend to

It's just a fancy mailing list then? Minus the SMTP leg, plus privacy/consent
issues and moving to a non-free storage format as well as concentrating the
presence of the "thread" at one site.

The best email lore out there is saved to mailing list archives and can be
linked to and shared just as easily. And mailing lists take "forwards" too.

~~~
Alex3917
> It's just a fancy mailing list then?

It's more of a social network built around email conversations. E.g. we make
it easy to not only to leave comments and share on social, but also to embed
threads within any other site.

Unlike email lists, we're also designed to make it easy to share great
conversations after the fact, rather than having everyone copied on every
message as it happens. I think one good use case for the site is sharing the
best conversations from otherwise private mailing lists. (With everyone's
permission, or if the list specifically allows it.)

> moving to a non-free storage format

If you look at the API response for our threads, it's actually much easier to
parse than any archival format.

That said we're not (currently) an archival product; we don't store the
original raw messages, and we don't output them into archival formats designed
for longterm storage. I would like to integrate with some archival products in
the future though. Right now when you donate your email archives to a
university, they are only readable in the reading room of the university after
signing an NDA with the librarian. I think we offer a good solution for making
it easy to redact some of the more interesting threads and get them on the
web, and I think a lot of that stuff would be super interesting.

------
meesterdude
Really thought this was some high-brow joke - nope! This is a real
product/service to share your emails.

I think this is a truly terrible idea. But what do I know? google thought it
was a good idea to have copies of the usernames/passwords for all the sites I
visit stored on their servers. I think that's also a truly terrible idea - but
they're a billion dollar company.

I would never use (to share) and I am doubtful I would find any thread between
two other people worthwhile. But if they can find a paying userbase, mazel
tov.

------
mirceal
Interesting idea, but anything that wants to read my email is a big Nope.

~~~
Alex3917
No OAuth is needed to make an account. For most social sites (e.g. HN), 95% of
the content comes from 5% of the users. We're not trying to be any different,
beyond the fact that it's also a useful business tool.

Also, when our Gmail plugin gets released the OAuth story will be much better.
Basically they have a scope that's read-only OAuth, but the plugin only gets
access to the thread that's currently open when the user activates the plugin
for that thread. That's exactly how it should work. There are still a couple
features missing, we can build it without them but we're trying to work with
Google to save some duplicated code on our backend.

------
djsumdog
I think it would be better to use reddit or hn threads; using them as an
outline for a blog post. I do that manually anyway.

Email would only be viable if it was a self hosted script. You're not getting
access to my IMAP server. Duck that.

------
vinayms
Beyond the privacy concerns raised by others, I am not sure what this would
amount to. Interesting conversations don't happen everyday, so this site might
become just a collection of random email conversations that people submit that
think is interesting. I am not sure if anyone wants to read them either.

Further, I don't think everything is "communityfiable". Like I said earlier,
interesting conversations don't happen often, so stuff like following a person
due to his one email upload or whatever, recommendations etc all seem a bit
too much. Following would make sense if it is someone who uploads stuff often,
but in this case anyone who does it would be breaching someone else's privacy
unless the uploader is part of the conversation and everyone agrees to share
it. But, again, as I said earlier, interesting conversations happen only once
in a while.

That said, I remember how twitter was derided in the beginning as being a
platform for people to share boring stuff that no one cares about, but it
turned out to become something else, though not by design but only by chance,
and is now quite successful.

~~~
Alex3917
These things sometimes evolve in unexpected ways, and sometimes it just takes
a while for people to figure out how to really use something.

Use cases I think are especially compelling:

\- Industry leaders who get asked the same questions a lot

\- Professors and notable intellectuals who already give their email archives
to a university when they die, and would like some of the accessible on the
web.

\- Politicians. Their emails are already published under FOIA, but I think it
would be super useful to folks campaigning also.

\- YouTubers, bloggers, Twitch folks, etc.

And then there are dozens of business use cases also for sharing stuff
internally.

I’m sure there are lots of other uses beyond these though!

------
yycom
But what is it? "Learn more" is just videos.

~~~
Tepix
It's a blank page that shows "Loading FWD:Everyone" ;-)

------
ryan-allen
The last time I hit reply all by accident I lost my job.

~~~
forbes
What, did you call a client a Giraffe or something?

~~~
ryan-allen
It was something like 'Giraffe', but rhymes with 'punt'.

~~~
oblio
Lesson I learned early in my career, luckily not on my own: never write
something that you really don't want someone to see, especially bosses and
clients and especially swearing.

Mails are replied to, mails are forwarded, long chains of emails happen, your
stuff gets out.

A colleague at one of my first work places made fun of a client. 10-20 replies
and forwards later, his mail was sent to a client. Luckily I think his message
was buried too deep in the resulting mail and the client didn't see it.

I did, though, as did several people from my team. We didn't say anything but
we all learned a lesson that day :)

~~~
isostatic
This type of thing was always inevitable from the day top-posting became
acceptable (and pretty much mandated by the email clients)

Before then, you would reply to points in line and trim unneeded information.
The entire conversation wasn't bolted on to be ignored by 99% of people.

~~~
oblio
It would be harder, but still possible. The "trimmer" could keep the offensive
bits in, causing even more damage because of the higher visibility.

Just don't write offensive stuff :)

------
CaptainZeepzorp
Ahh this is such a great idea for a website!! Hope it takes off, it would be
so great to see correspondences between professors or politicians.

~~~
amsheehan
Thank you! We hope so too. There's so much first hand knowledge locked up in
inboxes that people would like to share.

------
danielsamuels
Recently I've been thinking about writing a service which simply has an email
address you forward an email to and it makes it publicly available via a URL -
useful for things like open letters etc. I'm not sure if this is the same
thing, or whether I should just go ahead and make it..

------
ryboflavin8
We used this at the editorial house I'm at to organize the editing pipeline.
Super helpful when there are a bunch of people passing around different parts
of a project over email. Really hope this succeeds.

------
acjohnson55
I've been friends with the Alex duo for years now and I'm so impressed with
how they've stuck with this core vision. Glad to see the engagement this is
getting.

------
sush99
I signed up, but I cant figure out how to delete my fweveryone account- is
that not an option?

~~~
Alex3917
You can use Postman or whatever to send a DELETE request to
[https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account](https://api.fwdeveryone.com/account)
with your authorization token, but it's not in the front end yet.

Alternatively just send us an email and I'll delete it.

~~~
sush99
Thanks! I like the website, and probably will stick around. Was just curious
about not having the delete option :)

------
sbr464
This is a cool concept, have to think about all the good things I may have
spread across years of random PST files or gmail accounts. Hopefully at least
one in there!

~~~
amsheehan
One of the features we have is a naive suggestion engine. Upon signing up you
can feed the app a list of keywords. These key words are used to surface
relevant threads from your inbox.

You can see this in action in this video:
[https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8](https://youtu.be/MqbTUDCvYB8)

------
koyao
So basically have Twitter expand its character limit and ask everyone to
replace their emails with Twitter? How cool is that? :)

~~~
heedlessly3
Quora and Reddit would serve essentially the same purpose for readers.

That fact that it's email makes it more likely for an accidental leak of
personal information.

------
peter_retief
I joined up, how do I ask for accomodation advice for a week in London in
August? Do I have the right idea of the app?

~~~
Alex3917
Other way around. If you have conversations in your inbox that you think would
be interesting or useful to others, then you should post them! We have a
suggestion engine though, so if you enter in your hobbies / interests / work
projects into the relevant field on the settings page then we do a pretty good
job of surfacing relevant threads. (At least as good as we can do just using
metadata search, since we don't actually access anything in your inbox except
the stuff you choose to upload.)

But yeah we have a bunch of travel advice like that, it's definitely fun to
read.

------
tylermenezes
I don't use Gmail. Is there a way to forward an email as the name implies, or
does it only work with Gmail?

~~~
amsheehan
Currently we rely on the gmail API, but it is on our roadmap to expand to the
other major email providers. Is there one in particular that you would like to
see on FWD:Everyone?

------
fdsa_asdf_666
> We use OAuth to sync with your Gmail inbox so we’ll never ask for the
> password to your inbox.

Fuck. No.

If this is (and to be honest I didn't read it that closely) just about making
a particular email public, why not just have an inbound address?

submit@fwdeveryone.com

I'd actually consider using a service that did that.

~~~
Alex3917
> why not just have an inbound address?

We'd love to! Unfortunately going from just the last email in the thread to
being able to reconstruct the entire thread would be exceedingly difficult.

Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of
conversations is very important to us. If you get a permission request from
our site, we want you to be 100% confident that what you see when you preview
the thread is going to be what you actually wrote, and that the uploader
wasn't able to change the text at all. We support making redactions and
anonymizing folks, but are strongly against people being able to change the
text of what they or others wrote after the fact.

The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking
over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually
talk with one another when they're not on stage. We're all for reducing
friction, but we'd rather do it by just making a really slick Add-on so that
we don't have to compromise on that core value.

As for the Gmail OAuth situation, I completely agree and have been raising
awareness of this on HN since long before this became a big issue the other
day. You can see my tickets requesting narrower OAuth scopes here:

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp...](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=reporter:alex.krupp@gmail.com)

~~~
omeid2
> Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity
> of conversations is very important to us.

Are you sure you have really tried? when you forward an email, it includes all
the headers you need to for your validations.

~~~
aidenn0
I'm pretty sure most mail clients will not directly include _any_ of the
headers from the original e-mail, unless you do "forward as attachment"

------
psergeant
I initially thought this was satire based on 3rd party apps reading your email

------
myrandomcomment
Four wheel drive? WTH? Can you please offer a ..... :(

------
owens99
Very cool product! Will follow this and I hope it is successful.

~~~
craftyguy
I sure hope they aren't. This is terrifying, from a privacy perspective.

~~~
owens99
True, but only because it is OAuth. I like the overall concept if I don't have
to share access to my inbox. Better if it was via forwarding to a specific
address.

~~~
amsheehan
We are actively working on a gmail add-on which would allow you to not give us
access to your inbox, rather, publish single threads to the site through the
gmail interface. We have a few tickets open with Google to narrow the scope of
the permissions available to us for exactly that reason! :)

------
mychael
It blows my mind that people are having "Group Chat" conversations like that
via Email. Have they never heard of WhatsApp?

~~~
wongarsu
Email is much better for longer, well thought out replies and keeping track of
multiple threads of conversation, each of which may have no activity for days
at a time. Whatsapp is fairly limited to quick, short replies (mostly because
of interface restrictions). Even chat-like email threads have much longer
messages interspersed than what you would see on WhatsApp. Email also has much
better tools for finding old messages than WhatsApp

