Idea: Run code when you receive email
Hey all!
I am just playing around with an idea and I would love some feedback on it.
I would like to develop a couple of products that use email as a source of input. For example, Meetup sends you an email when your page receives a comment. You can then respond to that email and Meetup will post your email content as a comment. The infrastructure to allow that type of interaction is relatively complex. I would like to simplify it by simply sending a POST request to a given URL. For creating the above Meetup example, the service I would like to create would give you an email address to respond to. Each response in to that email address would then be parsed and passed on to a URL where code can respond to it.
I have quickly done up a landing page which you can comment on here: https://teamimg.now.sh/f/5ef0fbfc1404290007ac57ee, would love opinions on:
- if it matches the idea
- if you personally see value in it
- if you know someone else I should talk to who might be interested
Thank you for all the input!
Unsure if anyone has done this before, but awesome!
I'm thinking like zapier where email is an input. People could create common templates (ie. Unsubscribe me from this, alert me over text for this)
Awesome, thanks for the feedback!
What do you think of my landing page mock-up?
https://teamimg.now.sh/f/5ef0fbfc1404290007ac57ee
Neat idea, YouTube does something similar and it's very convenient. In the case of YouTube, it works like this, I make a comment in the video then when I check my Gmail, I got a message in my inbox saying that I got a reply. I just reply to the e-mail and it will be posted as a comment reply on YouTube.
Exactly! Imagine being able to add that type of functionality to any application with a few clicks.
I agree your next challenge should you choose to accept it - is how you convince these services to integrate with yours. In the case for YouTube, it's easy since they own it.
I really like this idea. It would be interesting to think about how this would be implemented and whether is a client side end user implementation.
I like the idea of email rules on steroids and smart actions based on AI, parsing email data etc, launching other scripts etc.
Nice big idea.
Definitely! Lots of directions that this could go!
Hello @ericadamski,
What's the idea?
A sort of email parser that converts any email into a JSON object and send to an endpoint?
You nailed it!
Do have any business use cases for it ?
Ya, this came up in my exploration of another product I was trying to build :D
So how does it work? Meetup sends me an email update. 1) How does your service intercept the email and send me anther email that I will reply to? 2) Email is sent a plain text. How do you handle security?
Great questions.
First the Meetup example I gave was just that, an example. But the service I am talking about should allow that same type of interaction.
How my service intercepts emails is sort of the whole project ;)
Security is a big deal! There is a lot of consideration and recommendations that we will make to ensure our users are protected against malicious emails and code. We also will eventually allow pass/block lists for specific addresses and/or IPs. Just as a start.
Just to hit on your first point again. How it works:
I hope this answers some of your questions! :D
Ok, that is what I thought. I have to update the email in all the sites for it to work.
For our basic tier that would be the case. If you go with the Pro tier you can bring your own email address/domain.
Have you validated the demand/the market? Are there many people who want to use email to reply social media badly so they will pay for the service? Just curious.
This is a developer tool, specifically for automatically receiving email and then sending it as a JSON object to an endpoint.
So nothing to do with social media.
This post here was to get some validation of the demand - with developers
Didn't realize it is for developers. Noted. Thanks.