Easier

I kind of let the project fizzle out after encountering those first roadblocks, but I did keep labeling all my personal emails, just in case.

I'm marking this milestone by starting to build in public and creating this page on IH. I had to create a logo, so I tried using Namecheap's free logo generator, which I've had good results with in the past. Unfortunately the customization options are limited and I'm not able to resize the icon with respect to the text, and it feels lopsided. So I tried other generators that pretend to be free but every time when it's ready to download I hit a paywall. Ended up working with Adobe Spark, which allows you to download for free, except for a markup at the bottom. Turns out it doesn't matter too much because IH cuts out that part :)

By the way, the story behind the name: I made a list of simple domains by going through 5-8 letter words and filtering out some I liked. I also made a script to search through the GoDaddy API what was available. I eventually settled on easier.email because it's simple and relevant.

So I reached out to freelancers on Fiverr to talk about a potential email classifier. That made me give a closer look at the data, which has various issues:

• I don't have anything to train a model with yet! I thought I could use my personal emails, but few of them are actually labeled. So I'm going to start labeling everything I can...
• There's a huge privacy concern with reading the content of emails in order to determine how to classify them. We would probably need to remove any type of private info before sending them to our servers, especially if we're going to store some to further train the model.
• Some emails have a lot of text in them. How does the model know which ones are important? Should we send only the top n characters? Or just can it work with just the subject and some of the metadata, excluding the body entirely?

In addition, I looked into the Gmail API, and found out that they recently tacked on a new "security assessment" procedure for apps that use restricted scopes, ie anything that can read or modify emails. They require using a third party who can charge $15-75k, which is a big no-no. An alternative might be to use the IMAP protocol, but I'm not sure we'd have as much control over labels and filters.

I'm starting this journey today by creating this page.

My problem: I get so many emails I don't want. I subscribed to an email proxy called SimpleLogin some time ago in order to stop giving out my real email, and it allows me to block spammy senders. However I still receive a lot, it's a mix of:

• random senders I never heard of
• promo emails I don't want to see
• mandatory emails because I use their service (Google, financial institutions, etc)
• social notifications I'm interested in, but aren't urgent
• order confirmations
• account notifications (welcome email, password changed, you logged in, etc)
• account verifications (verify email, 2FA, login links, etc)
• newsletters I'm interested in, but aren't urgent
• and of course, actual people

I spend a lot of time unsubscribing and creating filters in Gmail to auto-send recurring emails to labels, but it's a never-ending task. I gave solutions like Mailman a try but it's nothing much different from what I'm already doing manually. Gmail social/updates/promo folders are pretty good but they tend to miscategorize things and I miss emails I want to see.

What I'd like is for my inbox to be automatically organized with minimal effort. I don't want to see new email notifications unless it's something I need right now. For everything else, I just want to be able to check whenever I have extra time.

Then I went down the rabbit hole: can't my inbox be smarter? For instance, could there be a way for me to click login links or enter OTPs without loading my email? Could my online orders be nice and tidy and show me the latest status?

I don't really know what sort of product this is. Is it a Gmail plugin? Is it an email client? Not sure what the best route is. I think we could try plugging in some sort of machine learning model within Gmail and let it classify income emails. Will explore that route!