After going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my:
- contacts,
- personal messages,
- and important information that were tied to my company email.
None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
Because of that, I decided to build a solution (for free) that lets people safely sync their accounts to a platform where messages, attachments, and contacts are backed up.
If they ever lose access to their original account, they can quickly and easily recover everything.
The most interesting feature is that, if you already lost something (by deleting in your end) but some friend of yours sync its account.. you'll recover it back
I’m currently looking for 5 users to test this POC (for freeeeeeee).
Would you be willing to test the platform for me and share your feedback? Specifically:
What you think overall
What worked well (and what didn’t)
What could be improved
Any issues or bugs you find
Your feedback would be incredibly valuable and would directly help me make the product better.
> After going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my: - contacts, - personal messages, - and important information that were tied to my company email.
> None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
You are describing a problem in your ability to store your contacts, not any problem with retaining the emails themselves.
If I want to keep a contact, I send the information to my personal professional email. Done.
If I want to have a personal conversation, I intentionally shift it to my personal professional email - or at the very least, CC: or BCC: the same.
There's no need to violate security standards at my company, just to preserve the 0.01% of the information for myself.
This is almost surely in violation of a bunch of corporate policies... The whole point is that they don't want you having access to anything once access is cut.
I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.
Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.
I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.
Interesting that it seems that you're using proton mail. I confess that I wasn't aware about that platform till few days ago.. that's what I'm also willing to achieve.
Contacts might be fine, but I don't know of any company that would allow an employee to sync work email messages and attachments to an unsanctioned third party, let alone retain access after termination.
I'm working hard to avoid that. In order to be approved by Google, we must follow a lot of data security preventions.
But it's interesting how people are talking about security but they are or using AI, or using social networks but never complain about that. I'm not saying about you, but, few people that I asked for to test.
Thank you all for the feedback, mainly the legal ones. The problem here is not only related to the company emails, but, it also helps to other that have own domain emails but at some point, loses it (because some reason).
People still sync their email in Apple Mail or similar apps, but, after getting the phone stolen or some HD problem in the computer, everything is done!
The idea is not to offer legal problems but, data problems, but I totally understand your point.
While I was targeting a different purpose and solution, a personal solution, people thought on this as business solution.
I had important emails lost from different domains that I had in the past without managing the contacts or attachments properly.. data not related to the company, but, personal data.
For those ones that faces the same problem that this solution is for.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadAfter going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my: - contacts, - personal messages, - and important information that were tied to my company email.
None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
Because of that, I decided to build a solution (for free) that lets people safely sync their accounts to a platform where messages, attachments, and contacts are backed up.
If they ever lose access to their original account, they can quickly and easily recover everything.
The most interesting feature is that, if you already lost something (by deleting in your end) but some friend of yours sync its account.. you'll recover it back
I’m currently looking for 5 users to test this POC (for freeeeeeee).
Would you be willing to test the platform for me and share your feedback? Specifically:
What you think overall What worked well (and what didn’t) What could be improved Any issues or bugs you find Your feedback would be incredibly valuable and would directly help me make the product better.
Thank you so much in advance! https://app.trevally.io
> None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
You are describing a problem in your ability to store your contacts, not any problem with retaining the emails themselves.
If I want to keep a contact, I send the information to my personal professional email. Done.
If I want to have a personal conversation, I intentionally shift it to my personal professional email - or at the very least, CC: or BCC: the same.
There's no need to violate security standards at my company, just to preserve the 0.01% of the information for myself.
Giving third parties access to your business emails can't possibly have negative repercussions right!
I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.
Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.
I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.
But it's interesting how people are talking about security but they are or using AI, or using social networks but never complain about that. I'm not saying about you, but, few people that I asked for to test.
People still sync their email in Apple Mail or similar apps, but, after getting the phone stolen or some HD problem in the computer, everything is done!
The idea is not to offer legal problems but, data problems, but I totally understand your point.
While I was targeting a different purpose and solution, a personal solution, people thought on this as business solution.
I had important emails lost from different domains that I had in the past without managing the contacts or attachments properly.. data not related to the company, but, personal data.
For those ones that faces the same problem that this solution is for.