
Show HN: Easily publish an email conversation to the web - trevoro
https://beta.thread.is
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PanMan
Looks nice! But instead of authorizing you access to my gmail account, I'd
rather just forward you a thread. You could parse the incoming mail, and reply
me the link.

~~~
trevoro
Yup we've got that working too - but we wanted to make the email cleaning
algorithm better prior to launching that feature.

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zpj5005
It would be nice to see what the published thread looks like. Could you have a
link to a sample thread on your homepage?

~~~
trevoro
Sure thing. We'll put one up on the website. In the meantime here is a link:

[https://beta.thread.is/t/c487c28d-285c-4349-8e0f-396699df3e9...](https://beta.thread.is/t/c487c28d-285c-4349-8e0f-396699df3e95)

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yahelc
How many emails in a thread can this handle? A friend was JUST asking me of a
way to export a 55,000 email long email thread. Will he break this if he uses
it?

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HarshaThota
Just out of curiosity, how did the email chain become that long? I've had a
few that went into the hunderds but 55,000 is a lot.

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yahelc
As my friend tells it, he and his friends have used that single thread as a
way to keep in touch for the last 5+ years.

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state
For all of the discussion about how to create distributed social networks I'm
surprised there aren't more things built on top of email. This is nice.
There's a lot of potential here.

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Johngibb
I know you'd miss the syncing, but why not let me just cc something@thread.is
instead of having to gain access to my google account? It would be usable to
people on exchange as well that way...

~~~
kalv
We had thought about doing it this way but it won't help capturing the
responses from the people we email. This is how highrise works and it has that
pain.

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Erwin
If you are using Google Apps for your domain (at least the Business version --
maybe the free one too), you can setup a private Google group and CC it to
store such information and make it accessible and searchable to others using
your Google App domain.

Of course, you can also use Google Groups for a private mailing list, but here
you can store a thread (which, like gmail, is nicely collapsed) without having
to synchronize everyone joining your group. Handy for document support
requests via email.

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okalex
Ah man, I've been working on a side project that does just this for the last
couple weeks. Was almost ready to show it off. Good on ya, guys.

~~~
rglover
Launch it. Yours could be better for all we know.

~~~
okalex
Yep, I'm still going to. There's some difference between our ideas and I think
they're both valuable for different segments. I should have a show HN within a
week.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Why not collaborate?

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theone
First of all the UI looks clean and impressive. It'll be great if you could
also show who all were on that email thread and may be social links of people
involved.

On a side note, it'll be great if you could show me email conversation
happening in mailing lists. It'll be a relief from those boring and
complicated interfaces. for eg such email thread can be represented in this
format [http://librelist.com/browser//easymode/2011/10/9/using-
djang...](http://librelist.com/browser//easymode/2011/10/9/using-django-
easymode-with-django-trunk/)

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joelrunyon
What happens if someone replies to an email that's out of context.

Alternatively, what happens if I have a group thread and someone replies
directly to me rather than "reply all".

Looks super clean but I'm just wondering about some unintended consequences
that might come up if I use it.

~~~
trevoro
I'm not sure what you mean by "out of context" but I will <asssume> you mean
"an email that has nothing to do with the original conversation"

This particular version relies on Google's conversation grouping
implementation to extract the appropriate emails. If someone replies out of
context, that would be up to a human to move into a new Thread. We had some
thoughts like "fork from here" or "create a new conversation".

Right now your email conversations are not automatically sync'd but when they
are, any reply to your email conversation (what Gmail interprets as such)
would be appended to the page.

Unintended Consequences? Isn't that the whole idea? ;)

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ckluis
Now - I could definately see this behind a password as a means of
managing/storing/retaining email with attachments for a business.

Something with a little intelligence which referenced meetings & other emails
would be a sick corporate knowledge base.

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madsushi
Any plans on adding support for Outlook conversations? I have had great
technical conversations via Outlook that I would have loved to share with the
team, but ended up having to forward the convo.

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001sky
Twist: There might be copyright issues, absent (express) consent of both
parties.

But i could still see this being interesting in some contexts.

~~~
trevoro
We've definitely thought about that.

Personally I find it quite interesting that sharing a link with someone has
different psychological perceptions than forwarding an email. There is implied
trust with an email conversation - but the reality is you never know who is
being BCC'd.

~~~
peterjmag
Good point. Even without BCC, you have no control over who gets added to a
conversation later on. I can think of at least a few instances where a client
casually CC'd me on what began as an internal conversation, often with
sensitive information earlier on in the thread.

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rglover
Wow. I was just wondering if something like this existed not an hour ago.
Looks pretty cool, excited to try it out.

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sfaruque
I just tried this out.

Looks good, though I have a comment. How come I don't see the date and time
per email on the thread?

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slashclee
How do I delete a thread?

~~~
trevoro
You'll have that by the end of the day. (Promise!)

~~~
kalv
Delete has been added. The creator of a thread will see a bin icon that will
delete the conversation.

