

Show HN: Reach more people with a Share-to-Gmail-contacts button - ishener
http://gmailsharebutton.com/

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justinpw
This is one of the scariest buttons I've ever seen: When would I ever want to
email everybody in my Gmail contacts list? _everybody_??

~~~
ishener
Is it really so different from sharing something on facebook?

From my experience regular users sometimes prefer sharing with everyone
instead of taking the time to select specific contacts. They don't really
care, it's just email...

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CanSpice
I've opted-in to be friends with someone on Facebook. I've opted-in to follow
someone on Twitter. I have not opted-in to be in someone's contact list on
Gmail. That's the big difference.

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ishener
But you gave the person your email address. He wants to send you an email. I
just help him fulfill his wish...

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CanSpice
No I didn't. There's nothing stopping someone from finding my email address
and sticking it in their contact list. How do you think spammers get email
addresses in the first place? People give them their email addresses?

~~~
Brad2earth
I concur 100% with CanSpice.

I saw the email from a contact, clicked through and saw that your app only
asks for "view contacts" so I though I'd be able to choose to whom I'd send an
email or at least have some kind of confirmation before all of a sudden "BAM"
you send thousands of emails to everyone I've emailed in the past 5 years.

That's really bad. You have to improve the UX/UI so that there's a bit of
granularity and more transparency otherwise, you're going to lose your Google
API access... or simply disappear as everyone marks your emails as spam.

~~~
ishener
I hear what you are saying. I'll think about adding another confirmation
screen after the authorization.

~~~
Brad2earth
I think this is a minimum. Optimally you'd have a UI which allows you to
choose with whom to share... otherwise it's simply not pertinent for so many
people and thus simply spam.

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taneem
Even if I did want to share something with all my contacts on Gmail, the other
challenge is that Gmail considers EVERYONE you have ever emailed a "contact".
That's hundreds and hundreds of people, old mailing lists, etc. etc. that are
on there. It's not a "contact list", it's a list of everyone I have ever
contacted.

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Suaveit
Anything sent to more than around 25 contacts is marked as spam in gmail, is
there a way to get around that?

~~~
lutusp
Sure -- just move to a small, isolated foreign country and set up an email
distribution system that relies on compromised windows machines (i.e. bots)
instead of your Gmail account.

In other words, these limits are in place for a reason. If the Gmail ecosystem
didn't stop you from sending 25 simultaneous emails, you might lose all your
friends instead.

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CanSpice
This is nice and all, but I really hope nobody who has me in their contacts
ever clicks that button.

~~~
ishener
You need to think about it from the perspective of site-owners, not of email
recipients ;-)

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CanSpice
You (and I'm assuming you're the person who came up with this) need to think
about it from the perspective of email recipients, because they're the ones
who are going to be directly affected by this button.

You don't say at all how this works. Do you scrape the email addresses? What
does the email look like? Does it have any sort of opt-out mechanism?

How do emails sent by this conform to Canada's anti-spam legislation, or any
other country's anti-spam legislation?

~~~
ishener
There's no scraping going on. I'm using Google's Contacts API, with
authorization from the user who clicks the button.

Currently the email is plain-text, but in the future paying customers can
customize the email sent

You can opt-out simply by filtering out emails sent from your past contacts,
who you do not wish to receive emails from.

~~~
DanBC
This is not legal in some countries.

While your customers are the ones breaking the law you might find your network
access increasingly restricted.

I wish there was a better version of NANAE still around.

~~~
ishener
I don't know if it's illegal. I do know that it's perfectly moral. I mean,
it's just email... It's not like I'm tricking people into giving me money...

I think responses in this thread are somewhat lacking a sense of humor

~~~
DanBC
If it's a joke site then well done, v funny.

But if it is a joke site it's attempting to parody bad marketers and they are
viciously stupid and thus your parody is indistinguishable from stuff they
actually do.

Project Gutenberg started when Michael Hart tried to email copies of the
American Declaration of Independence to everyone on his local network; they
were not amused and so he set up a website instead.

The first commercial email spam was probably the DEC spam to all Arpanet.
[http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html](http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html)

If you do not have a confirmed, opt-in, agreement with people you're sending
bulk email to you need to be very careful or you risk losing internet
connectivity. You're not warning your customers about that.

You're also violating parts of Google's tos. Lucky for you Google refuse to
take any form of contact from the outside world so your service will survive
until someone there notices it.

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ishener
I would love to hear your feedback.

Would you consider putting this on your site? If not, why?

~~~
piran
You might want to check your spelling in your signup.

You put 'you' instead of 'your'.

~~~
ishener
you're right, thank you!

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fimdomeio
sooo... this is just a way for you to collect email addresses and annoy
people, right?

~~~
ishener
I most certainly do not intend to collect email addresses!

Regarding annoying people, however,...

~~~
AznHisoka
however what?

