

Rapportive (YC S10): 10% of your emails aren't from real people - martinkl
http://blog.rapportive.com/10-of-your-emails-arent-from-real-people

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limedaring
Rapportive is awesome, and this'll make it even better. I just launched the
search on HN for a cofounder a couple days ago, and I probably got around 150
emails all in response. Getting a picture, name, location, Twitter, and other
details for nearly every email really helped make things more personal and
easier to whittle down applicants without intensive googling. Great
application.

~~~
jacquesm
> I just launched the search on HN for a cofounder a couple days ago, and I
> probably got around 150 emails all in response.

That was the marriage invite one right ? That's an amazing number of
respondents.

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limedaring
Yup, the invite one. Not all were cofounders (probably half were people with
advice), and probably half the response for cofounders were people that
wouldn't work out due to location. But yes, it was an insane response.

~~~
jacquesm
You should write about your experience with that, I'm pretty sure that lots of
people here would be interested to hear that and how it worked out for you.

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sachinag
Rapportive is YC? I had no fucking clue. I signed up in March with the other
10,000 (yes, 10,000) who did in their first 24 hours. (EDIT: I originally said
30K; their blog says it was _merely_ 10K in first 24 hours. My bad.)

~~~
rahulvohra
It didn't take us too long to get to 30K either :)

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jacquesm
I'd be very happy if 10% of the emails I receive _was_ from real people.

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samstokes
Yup, we suspect anecdotally that the percentage of email _volume_ people
receive from organisations - notifications or list mail - is _much_ more than
10%. So adding this useful context to email from organisations should have a
large impact.

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dalmaer
I love this product. People have been talking "social email" for a long
time.... But this is the first implementation that gives more than it
distracts.

Wrt the new code that groks auto emails, I would love to see:

\- seeing that a Twitter follow email is from Twitter doesn't do much for me.
If it parsec the email and told me recent tweets from the follower? That would
be awesome

\- opening up this kind of support (email parsing) as plugins that could be
crowd sourced would be great.

Love it.

D

~~~
rahulvohra
Hey there, refresh your Gmail tab and checkout a twitter follower notification
:)

We do have an API to let folks write Rapportive applications, or Raplets.
Checkout raplets.com for some examples. Here's a funky video of the MailChimp
one: <http://blip.tv/file/3859911>

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tnorthcutt
I just added Rapportive to my google apps account. Looks promising, especially
with Bantam Live integration (which I've been testing recently also).

Feedback: the sidebar is sticky (moves with the scrollbar), which can be cool,
but also interferes if I have anything else in that sidebar.

Question: what makes Rapportive different/better than Etacts? I really like
the Send+Remind feature that Etacts has, for instance.

~~~
davidedicillo
Raplets are a really cool concept. We built one that I use daily and I love
it.

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eitally
That's pretty handy. I had just turned off Rapportive because of how many
people it was unable to find. It just wasn't very useful (given the types of
people I regularly communicate with).

~~~
martinkl
We find that the coverage varies a lot -- some users get a great experience,
for others very little is found. We really want to improve that, and covering
those 10% of emails which come from organisations is a first step.

Would this be sufficient to make you turn Rapportive on again? :)

~~~
eitally
I have had mixed results. For my corporate inbox it's not as useful (except to
identify sales goons who are cold calling and to see who in my company has
profiles on which social sites -- which can be very entertaining indeed!). For
my personal inbox it works better but is less entertaining since I typically
know everyone I'm corresponding with and already follow the twitterers, etc.

What I'd like to see is some enhancement in the area of CRMness similar to
what <http://noteleaf.com/> provides, notably the tasks/alerts feature.

To answer your question, though, yes, I am going to turn it back on. :)

~~~
martinkl
Great feedback, thanks!

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oozcitak
Awesome work with company info. But instead of looking up the home page I feel
it may be more relevant to look up the about pages. For example for
orders@dynadot.com Rapportive tells me:

    
    
        > Extends your domain by one year. 
          Time remaining on your domain will be added. 
          *Except .eu and .be. 3GB of bandwidth and 30MB of space. 
          Applies to new domain registrations only.
    

which happens to be the current offer for domain transfers on the Dynadot home
page. I would prefer to see some info from the about page[1] though:

    
    
        > Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain name registrar and web host
          located in San Mateo, California...
    

[1]: <http://www.dynadot.com/company/about.html>

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steveplace
This is by far the best app I've used in a while. I run a service that
involves a lot of email contact, and it's so nice to match a name to a face.

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andrewljohnson
Nearly all of my emails are from real people... that is, the ones that get
past GMail's spam filter, which is the only subset I care about.

I pretty aggressively mark as spam any auto-emails. Pretty much the only
company I won't do this to is Amazon, not because I don't want to, but because
I am scared to.

~~~
smiler
Why are you scared of Amazon?

