Show HN: ZenMail – Hey for Gmail (an email screener)

Show HN: ZenMail – Hey for Gmail (an email screener)(zenmail.shapea.com)

7 points by sandipagr 5 years ago | 3 comments

This is exactly why Hey was never a good business model. It's something that someone could do for free, with much less overhead. Did I mention it could be done for free? I guess you get a fancy @hey domain but... I mean that's hardly a selling point.

Regardless, this is a really cool project that further drives the point home. Props @sandipagr for a slick looking extension.

Me personally, I've just committed to ~5-10 minutes every week actually unsubscribing / marking spam every single email that doesn't belong and creating filters for the rest so they're neatly organized.

After literally 1 month of this commitment, I had a completely clean, inbox 0 about 90% of the time. Today every single email (with very few exceptions) that comes into my inbox is something I care about, or quickly ends up unsubscribed and I never see it again. Maintaining inbox 0 takes about 5 minutes / week.

sandipagr 5 years ago | |

Thanks for leaving feedback and the kind words.

I personally think Hey does have lot of neat ideas that they deserve credit for. Email management takes decent amount of effort in today's marketing/spam driven world. Gmail filters solve some of the issues but it's painful to create/update. It requires a strong discipline as you mentioned. This browser extension exists to simplify and make this a breeze.

As a business model, I think Hey will do fine -- as there are tons of people for whom 99$/year is a small sum to help ease this pain. With only 100K users, that's 10M ARR.

And congrats on setting up a clean Inbox!

sandipagr 5 years ago |

Hi HN,

I have been jamming on this new project and wanted to share it with you all. It’s inspired by Hey (the new email service) and the idea is to bring some of the concepts directly on top of Gmail.

ZenMail works as a browser extension (Chrome and Firefox currently). The core idea behind ZenMail is the concept of Screener, a new place where all unknown emails go and where you get to decide not only if you want to receive emails from someone but if you do, where they should automatically go (e.g. Inbox, Feed, or PaperTrail) with just a single click.

Under the hood, it uses Gmail labels and filters to add all these functionality. The extension therefore needs access to few Gmail permissions. This of course is a privacy concern. However, ZenMail is 100% local to your browser (except using Gmail APIs). I do not send or collect any information (also verified by Google’s Gmail API access process).

On roadmap is to add screening to any of your existing labels (available next week). I want to also add some sort of attachments viewer, contact page, email bundling, private notes and so on.

I would love it if you could try it out and share what you think of it. I would also love any ideas you have on how ZenMail could be more useful to you.

[Chrome] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zenmail/kbhafncken...

[Firefox] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zenmail/

Pro-tip: When you install the extension and go to Screener, you will see it’s empty at the beginning as only new emails from now onwards will arrive here. As a one time action and to start setting rules, I highly recommend moving some of your emails (or all) from your Inbox to Screener (Gmail’s Move to)