Inbox Assistant keeps your calendar in sync with your email conversations | Hacker News Reader

Inbox Assistant keeps your calendar in sync with your email conversations

myinboxassistant.com

19 pointsbdunn6 comments

I schedule a lot of things over email. Lunch meetings, phone calls, and so on. Inevitably, I'd sometimes neglect to add a particular appointment to my calendar after confirming via email...

So I decided to write a simple product backed by NLTK (Python's natural language processing toolkit) that would do something a lot like Fantastical for OS X - given a message body, try to figure out the when and where, and add it to a calendar.

The product is still in early beta, but I'm looking for testers to help vet the parsing algorithm with real world conversations. I've been using it for about a week for all my scheduling, and so far it's worked great :-)

It looks great, but there's no way any of my companies would condone sending emails out to a third party. If it ran completely internally there might be a chance, although it's unlikely, and our scheduling requirements are minimal.

Having said that, I love the idea, and I love the idea that technology can do this kind of stuff. I wish you the best of luck with it.

Thanks for the support, Colin!

Yeah, I know some organizations wouldn't condone outbound email going through a third party. Part of my inspiration came from Highrise's ability to copy emails to HR and having them be attached to the relevant question.

Have you thought of using Context.IO to eliminate the need for end users to CC My Inbox Assistant at all? IMAP enabled mailboxes can have My Inbox Assistant run in the background without any need for CCIng/BCCing. Take a look at our docs at http://context.io/docs/2.0/, specifically the messages calls: http://context.io/docs/2.0/accounts/messages

Very cool concept. I would love to see it taken a step further and invite/confirm appts.

The goal is that emails CCed to Inbox Assistant send the recipients an accept/reject email and an .ics attachment.

Still waiting on more usage patterns and feedback to emerge so I can figure out if it's something people want.

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