
Launch HN: EasyEmail (YC W18) – Gmail plug-in that helps compose emails quickly - filipt
Hey HN!<p>We’re Fil, Lambert and Matt, the founders of EasyEmail (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;easyemail.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;easyemail.ai</a>). EasyEmail is a Gmail plug-in that helps you write emails quickly. We train our software with your inbox and quickly suggest what you should write based on your previous responses.<p>We started working on improving how email is used about a year and a half ago, when Fil was organizing the MIT Fall Career Fair, an event for 6,000 people and 450 companies. He was sending 200-300 emails a day and feeling suffocated by the volume. We started chatting about some sort of a solution, and after a long journey (including a car crash on the way to our YC interview!) we finally have a working product and some happy users.<p>Our current product is a Chrome Extension helps you write emails with
two main components: autocomplete, and hotkeys.<p>Autocomplete searches through every sentence you’ve ever sent in the past and suggests 5 sentences you might say at this moment. An example could be me typing “how a” and the autocomplete suggesting “How are you doing?” together with 4 other sentences. This feature turned out to be harder than we expected because users say things that start similarly a lot (I have 207 unique sentences starting with “how a”). The question is how to sort all those sentences so they’re most likely to choose one of the top 5. Our sentence-matching algorithm includes things like frequency, recency, and context from the email you’re replying to.<p>Hotkeys are a quick way to enter snippets of text that you repeat a lot, but that aren’t sentences, like a link that you send a lot, or pieces of text that you send often but don’t merit a new template.<p>It’s very exciting to work on this problem, because email is so universal. That also makes it very hard, because we need to satisfy a lot of different email users. There&#x27;s also a lot of competition - most prominent is probably SmartReply by Gmail (those 3 buttons saying “sounds good” on your mobile app). The most important difference between us and them is that our suggestions are always personalized, since they come from your own mailbox.<p>This may sound like we’re trying to remove thoughtful emailing by just making our users repeat the same sentences over and over again, but that’s the exact opposite of what we’re going for. Our initial users tend to already send repetitive emails, and we’re just reducing the amount of typing they have to do. The goal is to give everyone more time to put into the non-repetitive parts of emails!<p>We’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts on the product and your experiences in this area. If you’d like to try out our product, it’s easier to go right away to the Chrome webstore: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;easyemail-ai&#x2F;giagehiaomegelcgdpihbdjihofogede" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;easyemail-ai&#x2F;giage...</a>. Please let us know what you think!
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JackC
Congratulations on the launch!

I hope you take to heart the privacy concerns here. In case you haven't come
across it, here's a useful thread from last year about Unroll.me's datamining
and selling of customers' inboxes, and the general trust problem for services
like yours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179077)

Frankly I'm not sure what it would take to convince me to open up email text
access to a 3rd party service at this point.

You have to convince me not just that you (Fil, Lambert and Matt) are
trustworthy, but also that the three of you can't be bought out by someone
less trustworthy (bearing in mind that your customers may well be worth more
to a shady business than they are to you!), and also that you're competent to
run a hugely valuable database without ever making a mistake (quoting tptacek
in the above thread: in your place, "I would be terrified.")

I don't know how you would crack this, but on the risk-of-hacking side as a
user I might be looking for technical reassurance -- say, that you're running
entirely locally instead of storing my email on your server in the first
place, or that you're only using temporary email access to store sentences
with k-anonymity or client-side encryption, and that your privacy model has
been published in detail for review.

On the risk-of-purchase side you could look at Keith Porcaro and Sean
McDonald's idea of the Civic Trust, where a private company's data is owned by
an independent trust that can protect the interests of your users, separate
from the vagaries of your business model:

[https://medium.com/@McDapper/the-civic-
trust-e674f9aeab43](https://medium.com/@McDapper/the-civic-trust-e674f9aeab43)
[http://digitalpublic.io/](http://digitalpublic.io/)

My feedback here may amount to concern trolling, since I'm over on the
paranoid end of potential customers these days and probably not your target
audience -- but I'm passing it on in case it's helpful ...

~~~
filipt
Thank you! That's extremely useful - definitely not concern trolling. We
recognize how important email is to our users, so we definitely want to
resolve those issues!

We're incorporating some of the things you've already mentioned (client-side
decryption, better sanitization), but we'll be a lot more cautious moving
forward. You brought up really excellent points, so thank you for sharing
those with us!

~~~
gt_
I could definitely use this tool but the privacy concerns would need to
treated as be your #1 selling point along with user side encryption. The
encryption could cost more but once a competitor arrives with these two
necessities, I will sign up.

~~~
filipt
Understood! We'll be working on this asap :) Really appreciate your feedback.

------
9erdelta
What is the plan to make money off this? Sell what you read in my emails?
Charge me a monthly fee at some point? Also my initial reaction was that I
wasn't aware that composing an email is slow.

~~~
filipt
We're working on a business version of the product, which will be a monthly
fee on a per user basis. We're unsure of the exact pricing yet.

It definitely isn't slow for all users! However, there are some that send so
many emails that any incremental speed-up is very helpful. Plus, we're looking
to start working on mobile, where it should be most useful!

~~~
namank
I think it's more than incremental speed up - it's the amount of mindspace it
takes.

~~~
filipt
Very interesting, I haven't really thought of it that way. Do you mean we
essentially lower the barrier to you starting to write an email?

If that's the case, that's a fascinating insight - thank you so much for
sharing it!

------
BjoernKW
Have you read Avogadro Corp
([http://avogadrocorp.com/](http://avogadrocorp.com/) )? That novel is based
on the premise of a tool that is intended to help you write well-crafted
emails yet quickly gets out of hand.

I'm not suggesting at all this will be the case here but this seems related
and might be an interesting read.

~~~
stevenAthompson
That was my first thought as well.

My second thought was the Cory Doctorow story which predicted that the first
true AI will be the result of a machine learning spambot and a machine
learning antispam bot getting stuck in an arms race.

This tech would make for an excellent means for spammers and malware authors
to bypass spam filters easily.

1)Infect user. 2)Generate new content based on old emails. 3)Infect everyone.
4)Repeat.

~~~
filipt
Oh man hahah, that's gotten dark real quick! Promise we're not trying to do
that

------
brd529
As someone who runs a support team I saw this and immediately thought “this
needs to be a zendesk app.”

There is a lot of knowledge hidden in support ticket replies but it’s
didficult to know what other team members previous answers would be useful to
crib from without guessing search terms. Heck you may even forget exactly how
to find your own answer from a few months ago.

On top of that there are concepts we have to communicate all the time as
building blocks of a reply, which is where it seems this service may thrive.
Let me know when you need beta testers for the zendesk version :-D

~~~
filipt
Awesome insight, thanks so much! I'd love to chat with you about that -
anything you're specifically looking for out of the product?

------
avinashjdsouza
OK, I'm loving a couple of things:

1\. As someone in sales, there are a truckload of emails I send out each day.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, no, we don't send out templated stuff
blindly. I think EE should be able to help me shave off about half an hour in
think-time in a a day. Huge.

2\. Organic-ish. Early days, I know, but I'm hoping that EE won't devolve to a
glorified SmartReply with additional text templates.

3\. There's a roadmap for pro-users. Which means at some point of time, there
_might_ just be an Outlook/Polymail plugin(please say yes). Which is when I
absolutely win. :-) Also, it's nice to be relatively assured that your data
isn't likely to be sold.

~~~
filipt
Awesome! so happy to hear you've enjoyed it so far. We've got a ton of
additional things coming up for you, and no, they're not going to make us
SmartReply!

Almost definitely a yes to an Outlook extension coming up - we're just making
sure now that we're doing a good enough job on Gmail before we start porting
over to another platform :)

Hey - any chance you could email me at filip@easyemail.ai? I'd love to set up
a phone call to hear how we could be better for you. Thanks!

------
dpflan
What is on the roadmap for this service? You have hotkeys and autocomplete
which means I can write emails more quickly. You have access to my email /
history of digital life (contacts, relationships, connections, brands I am
willing to let get into my inbox, etc): what will you do with this data to
further improve the email experience?

~~~
filipt
Excellent question! We're already starting to work on calendar integration to
help you out with scheduling. Over time, we plan on improving more and more
parts of your email - task management, figuring out which emails are the top
ones for you to read and reply to, who you should reach out to etc. That's
just a few ideas that we've been thinking about - would really love to hear if
you have any suggestions!

------
kazanz
I find a couple things irksome, if not malicious.

1\. The link to the privacy policy comes AFTER you take all my data. 2\. If I
uninstall your extension you have it programmed to give me an exit survey, but
it doesn't prompt me to revoke access for your app from my account? So you can
continue to read all my communications. At the very least tell me how to
remove it when I uninstall your extension, or fill out your exit survey. Don't
just hide the fact that you retain access indefinitely. 3\. You are appending
your marketing to the bottom of every email regardless if it used your product
or not. Thats crap, I don't want to spam every single person I communicate
with. Let me opt in, or only append when your plugin is used.

I get its a prototype, I get the "potential", but it seems you put 0 critical
thought into making the app safe.

~~~
filipt
Thanks so much for all the feedback, I really appreciate it.

1\. We're sharing our privacy policy on our chrome extension webstore page -
did you manage to see it there? If not, we should definitely do a much better
job presenting it, so thank you for pointing it out.

2\. So sorry, definitely don't want to hide anything! We'll push out the
changes asap to show our users how to remove your permissions. We stop looking
at your data once you uninstall (even if you don't revoke permissions).

3.Sorry about that! You can remove it easily in the "EasyEmail" control panel
- just hit "Settings" and you can uncheck the button

4\. We'll keep getting better! Thanks for pointing out that we're suggesting
some generic sentences - this tends to happen when the user didn't send a lot
of emails from a given email address (which means there's not a lot of data to
learn from.)

Again, thank you so much for your feedback. We'll get right to fixing all the
problems!

~~~
kazanz
Hey, Didn't see it on the webpage store. I expected it to be on the welcome
message I saw in the store. Probably due to similar experiences.

Yes, you need to remove permissions. That is absolutely imperative. Do you
delete the data after uninstall?

Perhaps give an option checkbox in your initial walkthrough of the app to
allow the footer only on emails using EasyEmail.

I retracted #4. The first email I got after the loading robot screen made me
think the "learning" was complete. I got an email much later saying it was
complete. The UX confused me. Perhaps instead of popping up generic message
before the learning is done, you can show a message, still analyzing data. So
I cannot in good faith comment on the suggestion quality.

~~~
filipt
Got it, makes sense. I'll make sure to update that soon! Thank you for the
suggestion.

We delete data the second we don't have access to users' account. However, we
don't store any new data after you uninstall us. The reason is that there's
actually no way of tracking who uninstalls us - Chrome Extensions are not
providing any real support for it. We're looking into it, and will
retroactively remove all data from users who uninstalled us.

Brilliant idea! We'll make the checkbox more visible! Got it, sorry about
that. Please let me know what you think once you get some time to play with
the extension! Thank you so much again for the feedback, it's incredibly
valuable.

------
codegeek
It is interesting to see Chrome Plugins being accepted into YC. Is the
potential really worth a billion dollar market ? I would think that YC wants
to invest in startups that could scale to high growth in a short span of time.
Are Chrome plugins really worth that much ?

Or perhaps this is just the MVP and idea is to scale it further ?

~~~
filipt
Great insight! Chrome extension is our MVP actually - over time we will
certainly expand to other platforms (or even have our own email client!).
We're already in the process for setting up a Gmail Add-on
([https://blog.google/products/g-suite/do-more-your-inbox-
gmai...](https://blog.google/products/g-suite/do-more-your-inbox-gmail-add-
ons/))

It also seems like we can keep going with a Chrome Extension for a bit -
Streak, MixMax or even Grammarly are good examples of companies who are
focused around a Chrome extension.

What other platforms do you think we could focus on? Where would you like to
see us most?

~~~
krishna2
A lot of action nowadays happen on Mobile. How would this help with that?

~~~
filipt
We're already developing a Gmail Add-on, which will work on mobile! We're
looking to go into mobile as soon as possible

------
russ_ross
I'd like to see you auto suggest frequent attachments. In some ways this
should be a more accessible feature, and certainly useful.

~~~
filipt
Really great idea! I put it down so that we can work on it in the near future.
There seems to be a lot of privacy issues with attachments. Do you have any
suggestion on how you'd like us to deal with it? Is it something you're
worried about at all?

------
vj44
I've been testing easymail for a couple weeks (the gmail add-on and the chrome
plugin). So far a very positive experience - saves me time on repetitive
emails. Looking forward to updates & more AI.

~~~
filipt
Glad to hear we've been useful! Looking forward to more feedback in the future
:)

------
yani
I would love to use you service but it is not acceptable for me to share my
email contents with someone else. Look at how mega cloud storage are
protecting users files

~~~
filipt
Sorry to hear that! I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that
issue.

Privacy and security are extremely high on our priority list since email is
such an intimate communication channel.

~~~
TheDong
> I'd love to find out more about how we could resolve that issue.

Perhaps you could have a privacy policy which clearly states no text from user
emails will be looked at by humans.

It's possible, though not easy, for a limited form of client-side encryption
to be used while still offering autocomplete; e.g. if each word is encrypted
client-side with a per-client secret, an encrypted "next word" could be
determined and returned without the server ever knowing the specific words and
sentences it operated on (other than length). There are other caveats here.

> Privacy and security are extremely high on our priority list

The lack-luster privacy policy doesn't show that at all.

~~~
filipt
So sorry about that - we'll make sure to improve our privacy policy to reflect
that better. Thank you for pointing it out!

We're working on client-side encryption right now actually, which will further
help us be better about your privacy.

The only people who can read email sentences are our researchers - and even
then the sentences are not identifiable. They are obviously bound by very
restrictive NDAs.

------
namank
This is awesome guys. To reply to all the people that are like this is not a
big enough problem, tell them that this is the start and then tell them what
is the next stage of your company.

To me, it sounds like a personal assistant that can automatically reply for
you to fairly complex emails. We get SO MUCH email, maybe this will actually
help us manage all that.

It is a very powerful idea, all the best to you.

~~~
mkagenius
> personal assistant that can automatically reply for you

That would make me redundant. 4 hr work week, I am coming.

------
RobLach
I’m very apprehensive about using something that _doesn’t_ charge me but reads
my e-mail.

Then again it’s a gmail plugin :P

~~~
filipt
We just released it two weeks ago, so we're just looking to get loads of
feedback as we're improving our tech to finally create a business version of
it.

We've got no plans whatsoever to sell anyone's data - we'll be a good ol'
regular SaaS product for business with a free version for personal use.

------
treis
Do you have numbers around how often autocomplete is used? For example, using
your "how a" example, what percentage of time will a user select a suggested
autocomplete?

~~~
filipt
We get used in 15% of emails on average. That number tends to vary a lot from
user to user though - we've got a few users who use us in 80% of their emails,
and some that use us very sporadically.

We don't have a number for the percentage of usage for what the user
specifically types, but it sounds like definitely something we should have, so
thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
TheDong
> We don't have a number for the percentage of usage for what the user
> specifically types, but it sounds like definitely something we should have

It sounds like a violation of user privacy. Data-collection and privacy is a
fine line, and I'm pretty sure any numbers related to specific text users type
in private communication being surfaced up to humans is across that line.

I'm fine with my phone keyboard suggesting next words. I would not be fine
with a human looking at the data model for specific sentences and words, even
in aggregate.

~~~
filipt
Could you elaborate on that a bit? There's no one looking at your data in real
time.

I'll make sure we review the privacy policy once again - you've been bringing
up some extremely useful points, so thank you so much!

------
bmlevy9
Do you guys feel like your product could replace mail merges?

------
ph0rque
Just added the extension. Curious why you need access to my calendar?

~~~
filipt
Awesome, what are your initial thoughts? Would love to make it better for you.
We'll be rolling out calendar integration in a day or two, so stay tuned

~~~
ph0rque
I'll give it a fair shake, then report back :)

~~~
filipt
Great, looking forward to it!

~~~
ph0rque
So far, I find it marginally useful. The replies it suggests are either too
specific (e.g. "We have" -> "We have been working on it since"), too trivial
("Thank y" -> "Thank you!"), or contain artifacts ("ph0rque" -> "phorque <").

------
jasonsmash
Whats the difference between Launch HN and Show HN?

------
kiki_jiki
No love for Firefox?

~~~
yani
Yes... curious about it too. I am seeing many of my colleagues switch from
Chromium to FF. The new version is a magnitute faster than anything I have
used. Fun fact - Edge browser on Android is actually my default browser for
the last 2 months and I love it.

