

Show HN: MailSlayer - An App Platform for Gmail that makes email awesome again - lem72
http://www.mailslayer.com

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lem72
MailSlayer is a Chrome extension that plugs in to your Gmail account to add
apps that are inline with your Gmail workflow.

It started off as a Customer Service Application called Ticketive, but after
we got a lot of user feedback from our Beta, we realized that people were
using it way differently than we first expected.

MailSlayer is 100% modular, so you can choose the apps you would like to use
and are not forced to use any apps you don't want.

The goal of MailSlayer is to make email better by adding useful apps into your
current Gmail workflow so that you don't have to go to another website or
service to manage these tasks.

MailSlayer provides a platform for developers who want to add functionality to
Gmail, taking care of user authentication, data storage, DOM manipulation, and
state tracking (with observable events when the user opens a folder or an
email, starts writing a reply, and more).

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talraviv
If they can save me from having to re-invent the wheel when it comes to
writing a gmail plugin/browser extension (especially threads and events), then
this is potentially very exciting.

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lem72
I will get Mike (Our CTO) and you in contact about the API! :)

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ig0rskee
Used Ticketive for a bit, looks like it could be a solid competitor for
Rapportive/GMail itself, especially if third-party developers start
contributing functionality.

~~~
lem72
Awesome, thanks for all your feedback and help with Ticketive.

Let us know if there is anything you would like to see as far as apps go for
MailSlayer.

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sukivan
Hey everyone, I'm the tech guy who built MailSlayer. If anyone has any
questions about the platform, I would love to answer them!

~~~
LogicWolfe
Hey, curious how you integrate with gmail. Is there an API for that? What
lessons learned can you share?

~~~
sukivan
MailSlayer integrates with GMail by leveraging a browser extension (currently
available for Chrome and soon to be available for Firefox) that injects JS
into GMail at runtime.

Google doesn't have an API for GMail, and is on record saying that they have
no plans to release one. GMail's JS itself is extremely obfuscated (Google
uses their Closure compiler to compress it before pushing to production).
Interfacing with GMail has definitely been a challenge, but after some
sleepless nights and a bit of luck we have a stable and flexible platform.
This is one area where we can offer major time-saving value to developers.

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Booknowme
As a startup, we love how easy MailSlayer makes it to keep track of our
customers and conversations.. Love it!

