Show HN: Adios.ai – Stop email interruptions, receive emails 3 times a day
adios.aiIf anybody wants to do this to their own GMail account without putting trust in a third party, this is pretty easy to do with the little-known Google Apps Script. You can write JavaScript that will run on Google's servers and do whatever you want to your account. (I use this to archive various automated emails if I haven't bothered to look at them, to keep them from cluttering my inbox after they're obsolete.)
Here's a script which I think should do the job, assuming you have a filter set up to move all incoming mail to a label called 'hidden_mail' (warning: untested!):
function checkMail() {
GmailApp.moveThreadsToInbox(GmailApp.search('label:hidden_mail'));
}
This is awesome. I've been wanting to setup this functionality for a while, but wasn't aware of Apps Script. One thing missing in the above is to remove the 'hidden' label.
var buffer = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName('buffered'); function release() { buffer.getThreads().map(unbuffer); } function unbuffer(thread) { thread.moveToInbox(); thread.removeLabel(buffer); }You could automatically archive the emails with that labeling feature as well, no need for the Google Scripts.
Really, how? I've never seen any options anywhere to apply labels after a certain time. Or is there a trick I missed?
What I understood is to add labels to e-mails and archive the emails that match those labels immediately. That way, you won't get any notification for those emails. Instead, you can open the emails whenever you want. Here it is: https://cl.ly/122f791d609c
Presumably you would write the code to do it...
buremba specifically said that there wasn't any need for Google Scripts.
Off topic but I wonder why people, especially usually privacy sensitive HN readers use Gmail and turn themselves into Google's better product with nothing to gain?
Running your own server or use a more privacy catered provider with Thunderbird or whatever client isn't so hard.
Nothing to gain? How about time? That's the common benefit of every *AAS product, both free and paid.
I could self host my own email server, cloud storage and backup solution, calendar software, facebook-alternative node, blog.
Or I could use gmail, GDrive, google calendar, facebook and wordpress.
Yes, I can do everything myself, but now I'm spending my time maintaining each of those different self hosted solutions.
To pile on, gmail is also well-known to have fantastic spam and phishing prevention abilities compared to most other email solutions, something you could literally never do at home yourself without some incredible software that you run yourself (and even then probably not). That's a huge value-add for a ton of users I'd imagine.
'Nothing to gain' is incredibly hyperbolic I think or this person has never read about gmail/used gmail before.
You seem to care more about the one time setup effort than continuously feeding yourself to Google.
Besides, there are providers like Proton if you can't afford to set one up.
Convenience and security are often at odds with one another. Not that Gmail search is any good but you can't search through encrypted mail, as an example.
That's an awesome solution, thanks!
What's the difference with just checking your email 3 times per day? Personally, I've been checking my email before I start working in the morning, right after lunch, and before I finish my day.
I have the luxury that none of my emails are "urgent" (i.e. I don't work in Customer Support), so I disabled email notifications and just take a look whenever I want.
I'm a little confused as to why one would need such a service.
My guess? The point is basically to create an aid to break your addiction. Why don't people just stop smoking? Why don't you just decide not to pull out your phone? Why don't you just put down that donut? Sometimes, we need an extra shove or hurdle to break bad habits.
Thanks for jumping in josefresco. Exactly.
Two big reasons we built it: 1. the discipline to only check emails X times a day is unfortunately not one that comes naturally to us, and 2. a large part of our job is replying to and dealing with emails, so we still wanted to be able to be in our inbox (to find the relevant information for a current task), but don't want new emails jumping up and interrupting our flow.
So nice, that feeling, when you get through your batch of emails, and knowing you now have 4-5 hours of un(email) interrupted focus time.
So this is the (choose one) not-free-in-the-future/temporary third-party-server-side equivalent of telling Mail.app/Exchange/Thunderbird to check for new mail every few hours instead of every minute. But those configurations are free and forever without any "we reserve the right to change the terms at any time" bogus ToS. Is that about right?
Some of the advantages vs using your Mail app to do this are:
1. it works across all your devices (as works at the gmail server level)
2. you can set exceptions (e.g. email from mygirlfriend@gmail.com should always arrive immediately)
Took us 10 days to build, and costs us nothing to run. No intention to monetize (we run a BI platform called trevor.io which pays our salaries. Feel free to check it out if you want to support us :) ).
TIL, people can get addicted to email. It's actually pretty interesting, I didn't know that was a thing.
One difference is that this controls your notifications as well. If I decide to only check email 3 times per day, then I have to turn notifications off for that to be effective. This means I may miss emails which need a reply sooner.
Before you let a third-party intercept all your mail (WTF) why not simply use a tool like Llama or Easer or Tasker or anything like that for Desktop to selective enable and disable notifications per app for certain times of day?
How is that different from this? You'd still be missing email that needs a reply sooner.
One useful difference is that you can set exceptions (i.e. email addresses that you want to receive emails from immediately).
Just let them call you if it is urgent?
Right.
E-mail is a substitute for mail, it is not a replacement for phone calls or SMS. (and both phone calls and SMS should be IMHO used parsimoniously by the people needing your attention).
Previous similar themed thread on HN, JFYI:
I often need to reference something from a previous email while working on a project, but get distracted when I see the new messages waiting for me. Otherwise, I try to only check email 2x or 3x a day similar to you, and notifications are always off.
I personally have the opposite problem - I don't check email enough for the liking of others - and I skim over it at least once daily.
I was going to ask the same. Anyone can disable desktop and push notifications and just set an alarm to check their email three times a day.
What guarantees are in place with your users preventing you guys from selling your company after you've gained users and then that new company storing everyone's emails and digging through them for juicy details, IP, insider trading info, prescriptions, 2FA info, financial info, medical info, blackmail info, nudes, passwords, or anything else some people might not want a company to have? Or partnering with a company that has a data-sharing agreement with you so technically your company isn't reading emails but theirs is.
I'd imagine this is a concern for some people with this type of service similar to how in the past Chrome extensions have proceeded down this path without anyone being the wiser.
It really seems like people don't realize the potential pandora's box that they can open by sharing their emails with someone or an organization, even if that organization is currently trustworthy.
And a couple of questions for you about your infrastructure security. What is your infrastructure security and when you get breached what will you do about it? I'm assuming given your company's ability to access emails someone will find you a juicy enough target and if you get big potentially even criminal organizations and state actors would. If that's the case you will almost certainly be breached to some extent because you have a juicy treasure trove.
I am the creator of https://DNDEmail.com --- a very similar app that implements do not disturb for your Gmail. I launched in April 2017 and have struggled to get users. I have 1,500 users, including 15 who pay for premium accounts.
I will say, adios.ai has really nailed the marketing message. The website does a great job explaining a modestly complex idea. I have struggled with the message and marketing. Mostly, my users are people who knew they wanted this solution and went looking for me. I think adios.ai will do a better job of convincing people who didn't realize this is what they wanted.
Kudos!
Using mutt and manually invoked pop3 from command line works just as well. You'll really hate checking your mail.
Just kidding. But not really. :D
This is pretty much what I do. Fetching new mails is a manual step, requiring me to run mbsync and enter a long passphrase to unlock my gpg-encrypted password file. I then have to run notmuch to tag things before I can read them in mutt.
It basically forces me to only check email when I really, really want to.
Thanks for this.
Just FYI it wasn't not super clear how it actually works, i.e. how to get it setup, is it a gmail plugin, or do I have to change my email settings to make all emails pass by you first (which is red flag privacy-wise).
I assume like with similar services you need to give Gmail API access which does afford the possibility of them reading all your emails (although I assume they don't).
Exactly right. Adios just requests API access.
The way it works:
1. creates a filter that filters your incoming emails into a hidden gmail label
2. at your chosen times we use the gmail api to move the emails back in to the inbox.
Adios never ever accesses the content of your emails, for any reason.
It's unfortunate that the Gmail API doesn't offer more granular permissions that would actually not allow Adios to access email contents. Even if I trust you, any breach of Adios could mean that my email contents are public.
Not bashing the service at all though. I'm a current user of Boomerang which has the same caveats.
Totally agree.
I just don't check e-mail more than once per a couple of days, same as my physical mail box. Why would anybody need any additional tool for this?
I'm going to assume you just don't get a lot of emails? For many people it is the primary form of communication across a company.
It is secondary to slack/jira here, but I also dont check email more than twice a day. If something is important, someone will find me. People also know I will click tentative to meeting invites unless I have good reason to be there.
Alternatively, install any desktop email client that has existed for the past several decades and point it at your email provider of choice.
The privacy policy really needs a strong statement to the tune of "we do not collect any of your email data or metadata, whether raw, anonymized or aggregated", or a detailed explanation of what exactly is being collected/aggregated together with strong guarantees about what the co promises never to collect.
This would be nice for slack, except if you’re mentioned you’ll still get a notification.
That's essentially how I try to use Slack, but when everyone else is monitoring constantly you're simply out of most convos.
That's just how Slack should work.
Ooh! Actually, you can do this already with Slack by choosing "Direct message, mentions & keywords" under settings. Not exactly the same, but it helps.
I really don't get why this isn't the default. It's the first thing I change when logging into a new Slack account.
Totally agree
We originally built this using a Google App Script in Gmail. Has been game-changing for productivity. Now launching it as a service so anyone can try it out.
Any and all feedback welcome. Happy to take any questions.
What about privacy? Do you access users email?
Certainly not. Gmail API let's you work with just message ids. Never accesses content, ever. Super important.
I trust that you don't access email content, but I assume that with the permissions that are granted you could, correct?
Adios needs the ability to change the label on emails (in order to move them into the inbox at your chosen times). This permission is unfortunately also the permission needed to access emails. If you know anyone at Google who can change this, please let us know ;) as we're keen to ask for as little permission as possible.
Importantly though, the content of emails never ever hits our system. The API calls we use only retrieve msg ids and uses those to change the labels. These are never stored.
But in the future you could store them and users wouldn't know something changed, correct?
Great point though - we need to be clearer about that on the home page :)
How did you achieve this with GAS? Did you stash incoming emails in a folder/tag and re-added them to the inbox on a schedule?
Yeah, exactly. Create a Gmail filter to filter them into a hidden Gmail label. And then at the chosen times, move them into the inbox
How does this interact with the Gmail "Snooze" feature? Are snoozed items actually sent back to the inbox? Or are they muted in some way?
Do people still use email? There are worse interruptions nowadays, slack, messenger, WhatsApp, push notifications etc
Or, set your notifications to only be enabled 3 times a day.
Personal email, sure. Work email, you're fired.
Does something like thiss exist for Slack?
- Turn off all notifications
- Write message as status, telling people you're alive but not available
- Shut the window
- Have the willpower to not re-open it
s/sh*t/stuff
Fair point :)
Ahem, I read my mails from my maildir, sync-ed with mbsync or muchsync depending on what systems I'm using... So, if I want to read my mails at ANY interval of time I simply change my cronjob and imap-idle wrapper script to trigger a sync or I may only change my dunst hook to tweak notification. No need to offload to ANOTHER third party my messages.
Sorry, pollice verso.
It's funny to me that you give such a strong opinion against this, but then end with a phrase of which could go either way.
? Pollice verso is a latin expression for disapprove, used normally by Roman's emperor to refuse right to live of a gladiator...
How this phrase can go "either way"?
Ps English is not my motherlanguage so I may made many mistake than maybe sound strange for other readers, if that's the case please point it out, it's a valuable lesson for me.
What I meant by that was it has not been agreed upon by historians as to whether the phrase means approval or disapproval.
Source: I did a short paper once on the painting by Gérôme of the same name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollice_Verso_(G%C3%A9r%C3%B4m...