Thanks for the nice product, and well done on a polished release - I've been playing around with it for a few minutes and I'm finding that its not only a great tool, but I'm learning erlang to boot. :)
Since I sent my first email in the 80's, I've wanted to build business-logic systems with mail-based interfaces - things like, have an address such as "calendar@mydomain.com" which can be cc'ed on emails which might contain future scheduling events, and have the calendar@ client automatically work out the details of reminding everyone of the date-target that was set .. Seems to me that Switchboard would be the ideal platform upon which to develop such services .. among other things too. See any gotcha's?
Its always amazed me that automated email is not used more and more for basic business processes - sure, we have mailing lists and autoresponders and all sorts of things like that, but the fact that most language/tech stacks don't really treat email as the human-maintained message queue, with first class priorities, seems a little lacking .. I guess Switchboard is an attempt to make up for that. Anyway, thanks again - I'll certainly be devoting some research time to this tool, and I hope I can build something useful on top of it ..
It should work very well for specifying the logic around the calendar example: Switchboard would accept the credentials of the accounts to monitor, e.g. calendar@mydomain.com, and then notify a "schedule notification" worker of new messages. The burden of scheduling reminders for participants would be on the worker, but there are a lot of tools for that. I like the idea!
One note: Switchboard is especially useful relative to a bare IMAP connection when you're monitoring many accounts. This is because it provides a lot of the boilerplate around restarting failed connections and issuing IMAP commands while an IMAP connection has an active IDLE continuation.
I agree that there's tons of room for more automation around emails. I think the lack of automation is due to not having high-level tools, which is where Switchboard comes in, and that emails are typically natural language. I'm personally excited to see Switchboard get used for email classification -- imagine if your business-logic could include the email "class", e.g. "sent by a human", or "marketing", ... etc. A bit like Gmail's categories, but open and accessible to developers.
So Switchboard will basically take the IMAP pain away so I can focus on the business logic? Great!
I'll play with it .. hope you won't mind if I contact you in a week or so in case I have questions or maybe even to give you feedback/demo of what I've come up with in the meantime..
Our motivation in building and continuing to build Switchboard is to make it easier for developers to process emails. Looking forward to more ideas!