waldr

+ 1 - we've tried so many alternatives recently and can't find anything that works as hoped.

Pipes was certainly an inspiration behind what we've been working on at tray.io - sad to see this come to a close.

Hats off to all those that worked on the product - great to see it remembered so fondly.

Hi, I'm rich the co-founder of tray.io..

There are quite a few different parts to our technology stack, and we were planning on doing a few more blog posts outlining the tech and challenges we have experienced..

For now I'll say that we are based on the jvm, using a mix of scala and java, typesafe stack, mongodb, redis, nginx, vert.x all hosted on AWS..

Savings, Selling (thing I own) and Freelance kept us alive for a long time until we first raised some money. Lots of occasions where the lights actually went out, but as old friends it was much easier for us to brush it off and keep finding ways to press on.

Hey - congrats, that is awesome (really like your landing page!). We've found the power of the community to be astounding, offers for help / feedback has been invaluable.

Thank you very much, have you signed up to the private beta? We'd love some feedback if so - please feel free to email me rich (at) tray.io

:)

Interesting approach to cross service contact. We've taken a different tact with our app - http://tray.io.

Interested to see how it develops!

Would be helpful to know a bit more about what you are building?

Can you strip out a lot of the functionality and get something basic up to test whether or not you get any engagement?

I'd completely rule out point 3, you'll get very little angel interest (no chance from VC's) at this stage, especially in the UK.

Awesome work Mat - excited to see what you work on next!

Great heads up - we'll do this. Thank you

Sure signup to the landing page, we are releasing invites in batches.

It really depends on how you manage your inbox, one of the drivers behind us building Tray was the customisation it offers. The triggers that define the rules can cover as many or as few contacts as you wish ie 'anyone I have a meeting with in the next 48 hrs' can be a trigger, or simply based on email content, pre-defined contact groups etc. In most cases this is a handful of rules.

Email rules that are setup within the client or service restrict filtering to contact, folder, content (in some cases). We can react to data that's outside of your inbox, anything from your relationship to the contact based on another web service, to accessing, storing, and sharing with services you use regularly. Beyond this triggers such as time, email load (driven from analytics), location can all come into play. We are really just getting started with the possibilities, a way to interact with custom web apps would be great for developers/companies that use bespoke tools.

Thank you - I'll get springpad on our list. We are working on analytics currently, I'd love to hear of any other API's you'd like to see hooked up please feel free to email me: rich (at) tray.io

We've just added some google labels support, so we'll be able to handle this in the not to distant future. There isn't enough time in the day to code fast enough :)

I really shocked and really saddened by this, I spoke to Greg just a few weeks ago. He had contacted me after seeing our startup featured in TWiST.

He was a smart, genuine guy that really cared about helping us. From what I'd picked up he was a close friend to Elon Musk and had backed him @ zip2, paypal, tesla and space x.

He gave us some great advice, and took a lot of time out to make intro's and give us feedback.

Hey - thanks this is awesome advice. I've tried it today and actually enjoyed it. It's made it easier to get clarity on my thoughts and led to some useful ideas

I like the idea of no notifications, this also ties into to having a good routine. Rather than checking and allowing noise to intrude.

I love the internet, so dearly. I understand your point although I think it's less about picking battles and more forcing a cut off point - it's obviously counter productive, but more obsessive behaviour.

Oh the irony of the event being shut down for overcrowding, when the company is called crowdsurge

I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single users works in their own way.

The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I receive is going to cause me a problem.

Bingo! You've made my day.. this is exactly as the service is intended. In fact our first ever rule was the exact text message scenario you've described.

Yep - that's a great example of how Tray would be used. Is there a particular CRM / Service you'd like to see integrated? You would be able to forward the whole email or specific parts of an email (ie attachments) as the rule dictates.

This is very true, thanks for reminding us... Privacy is obviously a huge issue, if we are going to be accessing your emails, so you're right we do need to make it a bit more obvious that the service is completely secure.

We would never store any of your emails on our servers, we would only store your oauth token/secret (with Gmail) or your login details (if using another provider)..  The rules engine would be a black box where the email simply goes in one side and actions are triggered out the other side so to speak...

Password protection is a good issue.  Obviously its not as simple as a native web application where we can just hash the users password so never actually store it in plain text.

For Gmail users we can use XOauth, which helps, but for other services we will have to store login details somewhere.  We are currently working on a way of encrypting the passwords that are stored in case of security breaches, but its definitely not an easy task at the moment (our private alpha is just using Gmail users).

Edited: wrong response :)

We have developed an alpha of the basic platform with a few rules that we wanted to use ourselves (therefore not strictly following lean), the idea here is to use feedback from HN to shape where we go from here, are there any features that you'd specifically like to see? is this something that appeals to you? the more feedback the better.

London (sorry for shorthand!) - we are currently on one of the accelerators in the google campus.

Fantastic! We are following some of the lean principles in order to help validate our idea before we head too far down the development path (great post here - http://theagileplanner.com/blog/building-agile-planner/buffe...). The feedback we've had has been great so far, but we really want to find out if there is any specific functionality that is best focused on.

Getting feedback from HN is vital in helping us shape the beta.

Thank you.  The rules you can set within the platform give you a lot more power, firstly you are able to hook into web services i.e Twilio and push messages that fit a certain criteria straight to your phone. You'll also be able to trigger auto responders based on the behaviour of your inbox i.e if the volume of your inbox dramatically increases you'll be able to set a responder that lets senders know you are being swamped.

Again these are specific uses of the platform, having the ability to analyse your mail and act on it regardless of clients/device opens up a lot of options for really putting your inbox to work.

We connect to Gmail using their XOauth IMAP implementation, which we hope will become more standard in the future, but for now other services we are mainly using native IMAP connection, so you will have to give us your username/password (we are working on making this as secure as possible).We are also planning to offer exchange support, but this is very much work in progress.

Text message support will be native using twilio, and we are also planning native mobile apps to perhaps integrate more deeply with push notifications etc.

As for emails, we are able to read all of the email content including headers, and as a user you will have the ability to trigger actions based on any sort of regular expression as well.