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16 Comments

Feedback for mailtolink.com

I often need to refer to email threads in Slack, GitHub, documents, etc. I built mailtolink to make that process as simple as forwarding an email and dropping in the resulting shareable link. I'd love to get feedback on it!

#feedback #product-feedback-request

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    As a company employee I would never forward internal threads to an external account, mostly due to privacy/confidentiality reasons.
    How do you account this problem? I mean, how can I be sure you are not reading my threads?

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      I agree that this would be a problem for a large set of potential users, and I don't have a good solution at the moment. And while I do have a policy of not viewing email content without permission, I don't know of a reasonable way to ensure that I literally cannot do so.

      Relatedly, what do you think differentiates this from companies storing their confidential data in SaaS systems, Slack, etc.? Does the act of forwarding feel more "out in the open"? Would a page explaining my policies in this regard, as these services do, be helpful?

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        Emails are more “formal”, while slack are more “chats” if you know what I mean.
        The only way I see it is that you offer some sort of E2E encryption, that means you can’t have access to the data, but yet it’s just a label on the website.
        I don’t know how it usually works but maybe you should pay a third party company to audit your code and get a certification or so that states it actually do as advertised.
        Maybe try searching on Google the correct way to handle this! Hope this helps ☺️

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    Love the idea, as @adamzerner mentioned, why did I not think of it. You do have possible security issues, but you could circumvent that be using orgs [ The Google docs sharing structure [specific people, people in org with link, anyone with link], so that emails are only visible within orgs. The it becomes like a filing cabinet. A lot of information is lost when people move out of orgs.

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      Interesting angle with the file cabinet comparison; thank you for the feedback and the encouragement!

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    Sounds interesting. But what is the difference from copy&paste or screenshots.

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      I find that copy/paste and screenshots are insufficient for any lengthy email thread, and often I'd rather have a link than some huge block of text or image, but you're right: they can sometimes do the trick.

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        When you can beat these alternatives, I'm accustomed to use it :)

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    How will it be different from copy paste?

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    I like it, I use to do it with Spark, it has the same feature

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      Good to know about Spark offering this feature; thanks!

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    I totally love that idea! It's something I find myself wishing that I thought of myself!

    I also love the landing page! Way too often, when people describe their product, I legitimately don't understand what it does, or what the use case is. When I read your description here I initially felt that way, and was worried that when I click on the link I still wouldn't understand. But when I clicked the URL and read through it, I thought it made total sense. I especially love that you used screenshots to "show" along with the "tell" part. I think that's what really made it click for me.

    I don't know much about this, but I suspect that this can be something where you charge much, much more for to big enterprises. Check out https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales. The author is known as somewhat of an authoritative source for selling and marketing software, and one of the most common things he says is "charge more". Think about the math. If you charge 5x more, you only need 20% of the users you otherwise would have to break even. If you only keep 40% of the users, you've just doubled your money!

    One small feature request I'd have would be to be able to view emails offline. I'm a weirdo and use an app called SelfControl to block the internet while I work so that I don't get distracted, and it'd be awesome for me to be able to still view these emails. Currently, sometimes I copy-paste them into Notes, type out my reply while I don't have internet, and then send the reply next time I do have internet, but mailtolink could make that process easier for me.

    Another small comment - why call it "mailtolink" instead of "emailtolink"? Domain name?

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      Thanks so much for all this encouragement! Do you have any idea how I could make a one-sentence pitch/description more clear, since you said it wasn't quite clear until you viewed the landing page?

      I think the number of potential users who want offline access is too small for me to build a feature around right now, but thank you for the feature request and for sharing how this would be useful for you!

      Re "mailtolink" vs. "emailtolink", I just wanted a domain with fewer syllables? Do you think "emailtolink" would actually be more clear?

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        Hm, I'm not sure how to improve the one-sentence pitch/description. Now that you ask, I'm realizing that it's pretty difficult. Maybe something along the lines of "Share your emails with a link instead of by copy-pasting." I'm thinking that it might be good to acknowledge the way things currently work, with copy-pasting.

        That totally makes sense about offline access not being a big enough need. I made the same decision with my own app, to postpone offline access. Fwiw, I initially added it and thought it'd be easy, but I ran into some weird bugs and it wasn't as easy as I thought.

        I think that emailtolink is clearer in the sense that it describes what is happening - you're turning an email into a link. To me, that advantage seems like it'd outweigh the disadvantage of an extra syllable, but I don't feel strongly about it or am I particularly knowledgeable about domain names.

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    Security issues aside, I love it!

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      Thank you for the feedback!

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