

ETacts (YC W10) will help you manage your relationships - cominatchu
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/etacts-manage-contacts-email/

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jbyers
I want this very, very badly. But they'd have to pay me a thousand dollars to
get me to type my Google password in that box.

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cominatchu
I'm a co-founder of eTacts. This is a legitimate concern and we do everything
we can to address this issue: <http://etacts.com/security/>

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tptacek
That's a fine security page (except that it needs to be clear that you're
holding on to gmail passwords). But, please remember: if you don't have a
security response page, which tells people how to contact you if they find a
horrible security problem in your application, they are within our cultural
norms to write a very unpleasant blog post about you.

~~~
cominatchu
good feedback, we will take care of this.

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tptacek

      (Why this is safe)
    

_We use the latest in bank-level 256-bit SSL encryption to protect your
information, and your passwords are securely encrypted._

 _Etacts will never email your contacts without your permission._

 _Your data is completely private and will not be shared with other users._

 _To help you keep track of who you haven't spoken with, we fetch your email
headers. We don't store the content of your emails or attachments. When you
view an email in etacts, we fetch the email directly from your Gmail server
and don't store it on our servers._

Uh. Hey, Etacts. Are you storing my password long term or not? That's my
question. Glad you're doing the bank security encrypty thing. But you can't
keep my Gmail password.

~~~
cominatchu
we do keep your gmail password, but you have the ability at any time to delete
your gmail password or your entire etacts account. We will try to make this
more clear, thank you for the feedback.

~~~
Frazzydee
Just throwing a thought out there: What about an option that allows people to
use etacts without storing their password. So every time a user wants to
"refresh" their data, they would have to re-enter their password.

The security advantages are limited– the password has to go through you guys
either way– but there may be a difference psychologically.

I don't think mail2web would be as widely-used if they didn't have a policy
against storing passwords.

~~~
cominatchu
this is a good idea, we'll talk to our users and see if this is a wanted
feature.

~~~
tptacek
It won't be. Don't bother.

You can't convince people like me to give you a gmail password. It's simply
not going to happen.

Meanwhile, you could convince my mom to give up her gmail password with an
animated GIF of a cartoon padlock.

What we can help you with here is how to communicate about security without
setting off alarm bells. Your security page isn't awful; "bank security" is a
security idiom, it's fine that you use it. But we can help you make it better.
Make it clear that you're storing passwords so nobody can say they're
surprised about, and make sure security researchers know how to contact you.

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jayair
I think its a good idea; instead of going after email overload as a whole, go
after a sub problem that it creates.

Please, fix the lander. It looks way too close to
<http://www.getballpark.com/> but only worse. If the metalab guys haven't
tweeted about it yet, they definitely will. If you need some tips about it
just send me a note jay (at) anomalyinnovations.com.

~~~
vaksel
forget looking too close...it is it...that's a 1 to 1 copy of their template

~~~
chintan
And we know where the MOTHER SOURCE TEMPLATE resides:

<http://basecamphq.com/>

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corruption
I hate to say this, but this would be an ideal addition to "labs" in gmail. I
can't imagine it would take much for them to do either.

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jfarmer
Small product nit: I think you weight older messages too highly.

#1 on my list is my girlfriend (cool). #2 is my co-founder from my last
company (also cool). #3 is my dad.

#4 is my ex-girlfriend, and it's telling me to email her (fail).

~~~
adamsmith
We originally had this feature in Xobni. We informally called it the ex
girlfriend finder because those tend to be the people you used to communicate
with a ton but not recently.

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keeptrying
This is a very useful feature but I dont think it'll work as a standalone
product.

I'm guessing they are probably targeting gmail first so that they get bought
out by Google if they get a ton of users.

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tsally
A lot of people are expressing concern about having to give you their Gmail
password. Have you considered implementing an offline scanner for desktop
clients that would then upload the contact and frequency information to your
severs through SSL? You could then overlay your services in
Thunderbird's/Outlook's/Mail's desktop interfaces.

That kind of kills the convenience of the service, but personally I would
accept that for increased security.

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rrikhy
Precisely what i've been looking for. Thought Gist was a solution. They got it
wrong, you guys got it right.Was actually planning on building this for
myself.

I hate feature creep too, but important:

1\. Company pages for company e-mails

2\. Merging contacts

3\. how to smartly import facebook and linkedin like gist does i.e. keep the
people with companies, chuck the rest.

4\. Updating/removing accounts etc needs some QA

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Goosey
I love this idea, but it doesn't seem to handle Unicode properly. All my
contacts written in Hangul show up like "=?Euc-Kr?B?Sejh/Ly3?=" :(

~~~
cominatchu
we will fix this asap

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JeffJenkins
I thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which
I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate
every medium a person uses for it to be really useful.

I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication
with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.

~~~
jfarmer
That's just an excuse to quit. So you start with email. Email is the baseline.
The important thing is to have a clear vision and start building shit.

If it's really important to integrate other services, you can do that later.
(I don't think it is, personally. At least not for the kind of people who
would pay you money.)

~~~
JeffJenkins
At the time -- this was like 5-7 years ago -- I wasn't terribly interested in
startups and doing school work or hanging out with my friends probably seemed
like a better use of my time. I actually solved a lot of that problem on a
later project where I needed to write parsers for the log formats of a bunch
of IM/IRC clients, but now I really am not interested in getting reminders
about who I haven't talked to.

What this sort of thing does really bring home for me is that in terms of
trying to do a startup through y-combinator I should probably ignore whether I
believe there is a market for something as long as I think some people would
find it useful.

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shawndrost
Feedback: when I log in for the first time, I don't really have any prompts,
and I'm not sure what I should do, or why I should do it. I'm thinking
something like "Do you want to email XXX -- you used to talk to them a lot,
and it's been a while." If you can help me along the path from "I just signed
in" to "ETacts just helped me!", that would be awesome.

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cominatchu
<http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/>

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jfarmer
Hot shit! This was something on my list of things to build for myself. Now I
don't have to.

~~~
iamwil
I thought about this a while back too, but convinced myself not to do it
because I didn't think people would admit to using it. And if not, then it
couldn't even spread by word of mouth.

But it looks like that's not the case.

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natep
Wow! I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but way more
useful than what I was going to do. What I had in mind was just a Google
Reader Trends but for email (showing you when you received/read email by day,
time of day, day of week, etc visually).

Having graphs in etacts would be nice, but I think you nailed the really
important features! Now I just have to wait for the solution to the password
problem. A desktop application, while less convenient than a web app, would
still be awesome, and could even be made a portable install I take around on a
USB stick.

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whalesalad
The external UI looks like Picwing and Etherpad had a baby.

~~~
whalesalad
The internal UI looks a _lot_ like Etherpad too.

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moseslee
The feeling I get when etacts shows me my most important contacts is like the
feeling I get when I see a tag cloud of my tweets. Insightful meta data.

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rriepe
Site looks great. You've got some gradient drop-offs on both the right and
left sides.

If you can't see it, here's a method I use:

Paste a screenshot in photoshop. Hit Ctrl+U and turn the saturation all the
way up. Then change the hue so the whole site looks orange or green (the eye
tends to blur blue together). You'll more easily notice where the gradients
are cut off.

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joshu
I love the idea of this. Can't wait to see more. I also wish it didn't have to
store my password.

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ashishbharthi
Awesome is the word I would use to describe it. And it reassured me that the
people I think should be important to me are the people important to me.

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kirpekar
Did not work for me. Took 10+ minutes to load the People tab. Then showed only
1 contact. I had emailed this contact last year to sell something.

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kbrower
Gmail made me change my password due to suspicious activity

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vaksel
were the screenshots with internal YC emails intentional?

~~~
howsta
Also Harj's email isn't his real one. The one on the front page is
harj@default.net (which is fake)

~~~
Frazzydee
I think he's talking about the screenshot posted on techcrunch, which shows
harj's real email.

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lionhearted
Hey guys,

I had an idea for a work-around for you for people who don't want to give
their password. What if BCCing myaccount@etacts.com updated your info? Doesn't
seem like it'd be hard to implement. I'd use the service if it had that
feature, it looks _really_ good. I think you guys are doing something really
needed and cool, cheers and good luck,

Sebastian

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aviel
Gist.com?

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param
are you interested in selling a stand-alone server license?

~~~
cominatchu
yes, this is something we are considering. it depends on the demand for
something like that.

~~~
param
please reach out to me when you are ready to discuss. My email is in the
profile

Note - we are a company that hosts email on google apps. However, we can not
and will not use this service through your website. However, something that we
can host ourselves, and includes pricing that is friendly to small companies
will be eagerly looked at.

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albertcardona
Facebook is doing this already, and gmail can add it in no time. Not a good
prospect for ETacts.

~~~
mhansen
Where is facebook doing this? I haven't seen it

~~~
jgrahamc
Facebook frequently suggests to me people I haven't been in contact with for a
while.

