The API is really nice to use and makes interacting with Gmail way easier relative to IMAP. I'm surprised they don't recommend using this API to build full email clients. I fully expected that to be one of the core use cases.
The reason its hard (currently) to build a mail client using the API is that call to list the threads in your inbox or any other label doesn't actually return the messages in those threads. So its hard to show the people that are on the thread as well as some of the timestamp. If they added some more summary data to the thread object, I could see this becoming feasible.
One of the key differences between your solution (and fut.io, followup.cc) and our snooze is that we also do the conditional "but don't bring this back if there's a reply on this thread". Along with being able to "snooze" an email you're sending out with the conditional. This brings us much more in line with Boomerang's main functionality.
Plus our snoozing functionality is 100% free, no matter how many you schedule, or how long it's for :)
Oh, and you can see/edit/manage your snoozed emails all from right within Gmail.
And we also have the "Awaiting Reply" view that doesn't require you actually DO anything, other than send out emails. We show you a custom list of the last 20 emails you've sent that don't yet have a reply.
fyi: fut.io will send you an email asking if you want to cancel the followup if there's a reply on the thread. I think the follow up email has to be replied to, though.
And a competitor to you would be Follow Up Then which does what you do, I think. (http://fut.io/) I've used it for a very long time, but just switched to the snooze button in Streak. It's slick.
Any chance your project is open source? I would do this to something like 2 emails a year, but I'm intrigued by how it works from the technical aspect. Is there a database, or just exim/postfix magic?
Seriously, I'm not trolling - why would you want to snooze an email (hide it from inbox and have it come back later - I had to go look it up)?
Apart from that I like the API idea - I have been beta testing my own personal document scanner - I email myself photos of bills and receipts and file them under the subject line (ie file-as bills.electricity) - it beats the hell out of a document scanner I never used.
Anyway I was going to link it to Evernote but I just don't use Evernote enough to justify it
I use my Gmail inbox as sort of a todo list. If a conversation is in my Inbox, it needs attention from me - I need to do some work related to it, reply to it, forward it, etc. Once I'm done with an email thread, I immediately archive it.
If you use this workflow (many do), snoozing an email is useful. I use it primarily for threads where I'm not able to reply and provide information immediately (so removing it from my inbox until I can reduces distraction), and for threads where I'd like to follow-up in a few days, if for example I don't get a reply.
Sounds like you should start using flags instead ("stars" in web-gmail?) Then your todo list should be easily accessible through a filtered list of flagged messages. Most IMAP clients offer this out of the box.
I have labels for organization but once something is marked as read or out of my priority inbox (where starred emails go) is has an extremely low priority and might as well not exist. If it's in my inbox and unread it gives me anxiety not to action it. A Snooze feature is a perfect middle ground.
> Seriously, I'm not trolling - why would you want to snooze an email (hide it from inbox and have it come back later - I had to go look it up)?
Example that happened to me yesterday: a colleague asks me for a piece of information that I know I can find in a book at home, but I'm at work. I snooze the email so that it doesn't fall at the bottom of my inbox, and so that it gets redelivered when I'm home and can access the book.
Hypothetically, wouldn't really aggressive archiving accomplish the same task?
Have a 0-email inbox, and if you get something that you can't address immediately (but you can take care of later in the day), then you leave it in the inbox. In the meantime, anything you can act on in some way gets acted upon and then archived. By the end of the day you would ideally have just that email in your inbox (and even in a realistic world you might have a few tasks lingering in your inbox, but few enough that you can glance and see that "task" still there). Check your email at the end of the day and act on the things you needed to postpone for whatever reason (as well as pruning emails loitering in the inbox).
This requires, as previously said, really aggressive archiving, but since there's no difference between inbox and all-mail as far as I know (unless you use it as a search operator e.g. "from:[email protected] label:inbox"), it wouldn't be that big a cost (except that you would have to remember to archive or go through later and archive stuff).
I had been doing this somewhat organically for a while - tagging emails that didn't get filtered automatically and archiving them when there was nothing more for me to do with them - but when I disabled all of my filters (a misguided experiment I don't recommend anyone attempt) I stopped.
I'm awful at remembering to do anything. When doing inbox zero, I find it really useful to be able to postpone emails so I get a push notification on my phone when they come back into my inbox. That way I know if there is anything in my inbox, I should look at it pretty soon to decide how to process it (deal with it or postpone it)
Agressive archiving and postponing emails aren't mutually exclusive. They complement each other really well.
[edit] It also reduces stress. Some things can be dealt with until the evening, or tomorrow, or the weekend. It's really nice not having to pick though a middle of things that need to be done later and now and be constantly reminded that there's all these things to do. Of course, you can tag them or put them in folders, but it's nice when those tags/folders then let you know they're due.
Yeah, I do hardcore archiving and practice inbox 0 as much as possible, and it does alleviate that need. But it's still nice to have the email be at the top just when I get home.
AFAIK it's related to the "inbox zero" concept. You want nothing in your inbox except things that need to be actioned, but if you can't action something yet, you might want to snooze it.
> I'm surprised they don't recommend using this API to
> build full email clients. I fully expected that to be
> one of the core use cases.
I didn't see today's API announcement, but I'd be surprised if they wanted to encourage that. Similar to how Twitter doesn't want you to write full-fledged Twitter clients.
If we write full-fledged Gmail clients, won't they miss out on the ad revenue? Maybe not; maybe they're just glad to tie us to their service and data-mine our emails even if we're not using Google's web client.
Still, I'd be scared of basing a lot of work around this API, since they have a history of deprecating and discontinuing things in the past...
There's already a setting they lets you turn off ads. In any case, revenue from those ads is probably incomparable to the data-mining which they can then use to show you ads elsewhere.
Is there any way to use this feature without all the other Streak stuff cluttering up the UI (among other things, the "box" icon on every message in list view, Pipelines on the left, big button on the top, six new buttons in compose view). The CRM stuff looks spiffy, and getting the snooze feature through you is good advertising in any case, but I don't currently have a use case for those features, so I can't use the extension if it's going to fill up the UI with them.
I use a small google script to "snooze" my emails. I change them to a custom label which the script looks for. The script just runs once a day and sends me a summary of ones with this label if I haven't already replied to them.
Just a heads up, your Youtube videos on the home page won't play in Chrome if you loaded the page over HTTPS (you get a blank pop-up and the "This page contains insecure content." message). Slick product you have!
Aleem, this is great to see. We at FollowUp.cc (https://followup.cc) have been doing snoozing for quite a while and have a Chrome extension that does this as well. We are getting close to rewriting our entire extension from the ground up, and this API is definitely going to make our lives easier. Side note, I'm a big fan of Streak =)
It will be interesting to see how and if Context.io (http://context.io) starts to use this API. We use Context, and it's a fantastic product.
How fine grained are the permissions? Can your snoozing app operate with a sufficiently restrictive set of permissions that you are prevented from reading my email?
This is a good point. Typiucally, reminders are useful for reminding your team about a box (a deal or customer...) that needs to be looked at. Snoozed emails are just for you and remind you about a particular email.
There is clearly some overlap in use case and we're working on making that better but wanted to get out Snoozing as soon as possible.
The API is really nice to use and makes interacting with Gmail way easier relative to IMAP. I'm surprised they don't recommend using this API to build full email clients. I fully expected that to be one of the core use cases.
The reason its hard (currently) to build a mail client using the API is that call to list the threads in your inbox or any other label doesn't actually return the messages in those threads. So its hard to show the people that are on the thread as well as some of the timestamp. If they added some more summary data to the thread object, I could see this becoming feasible.