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Ask HN: product idea

13 points by petervandijck ↗ HN
Thoughts on this product idea? I got it when cleaning out my email inbox this morning (on Gmail).

10% of my emails are from friends (good), 30% from work (ok), and the rest are messages from companies (Amazon) and social networks (Facebook). Mailing lists get filtered out of my inbox into labels.

If we could do something with those message type emails, wouldn't that be nice?

Then again, perhaps filters are ok for this?

Also, does it make sense (at all) to build a product on top of Gmail? Because they can build any really valuable service themselves, later, and push you out of the market. (Same with Twitter, ...)

8 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 25.1 ms ] thread
mdolon
A friend of mine was attempting to filter Gmail using AI, is this similar to what you were thinking of? His product is: http://gtriage.com/
elibryan
I personally think it's a great idea.. but I'm a bit biased =) (Thanks for the plug, btw)

The numbers on good vs blab email are pretty typical, but for many folks even the "good" can be overwhelming. Our goal with Gtriage is finding the more important emails even within that smaller "good" set.

And new hotmail looks very cool. It's very nostalgic.. Mozilla's Raindrop project looked very promising as well.

imp
I used to get a lot of emails from companies and organizations too. Then I just unsubscribed from all of them. Problem fixed.
mrtom
Check out otherinbox.com too
mrmxyzptlk
I use otherinbox to filter out all my messages. beta.otherinbox.com - generate e-mails on the fly so that everything is organized. It's kind of like generating filters in gmail on the fly when you sign up for a new service.
thafman
I wanted to go one further and parse emails form major services (FB, Digg, Mint, etc.) to create a dashboard where you can see all the services that you're signed up for and see all emails from a single service. Never ended up doing this because I never got the feeling that gmail apps are a big enough market.
faramarz
I find that i'm much more open to subscribing today than I was say 2 -3years ago. The industry etiquette has improved a lot, I actually value 80% of emails I get or they provide some value. (even the endless linked discussions notifications)

But then again, I consider myself a power user. So Who are you targeting with this?