
Ask HN: Do you want email parsing API for free? - jakubdziwisz
AirHelp.com helps passengers get compensation for delayed flights. We’ve combined deterministic programming (RegExp, XPaths, etc.) with some fancy NLP stuff to build travel email parsers that perform equally well as Google’s proprietary parsers. Now we’re thinking about allowing anyone to use our parsing API to power their own projects, for free. In exchange we&#x27;d like to inform email recipients, that have been delayed, that they deserve compensation.<p>Would you use it?
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cpinto
No. Although the email parser as a service idea is nice, it has a couple of
major downsides.

For starters, it’s now a GDPR world: I want to avoid the risk of breaches on
your side affecting mine. Secondly, today you want to send nice compensation
emails, tomorrow (under pressure from your board) you start mining the emails
for competitive research and increased monetisation. I wouldn’t want to put
the reputation of my service on the line for this.

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gtsteve
No. It sounds like a really nice idea but I can't have you e-mailing my
customers, that'd just be embarrassing. I would also need to really understand
your security posture.

I couldn't use it for my app as all its functionality needs to work in an
airgapped environment. But in any case, I would consider offering a paid tier
where you don't use it to send marketing messages.

I also believe that using it in the way you propose could cause you to run
foul of GDPR because there isn't a way to separate the marketing message from
the app functionality but I don't have a well formed version of that idea yet.

