This is a fantastic concept, but I will never use it because I don't use Chrome and I don't like the idea of my inbox being different on each device I use.
I'll just wait for Google to either ripoff the idea or (hopefully) acquihire the company and integrate it into Gmail itself.
Really the idea that the message preview is the FIRST two lines is comically absurd, especially for a company like Google. It's actually amazing to me nobody has done this yet.
As an initial concept it's interesting but not very useful for most people in it's current state as it ultimately requires me to spend more time in my inbox. I think the real potential is in your "Coming Soon" feature, where it will hopefully be able to automatically figure out the best subject lines for me and save me time in the long run. Ultimately, it'd be great if it could decipher whether or not the email can be answered with a simple answer (yes/no, a time/date, etc), and provide the buttons to respond to it without ever actually opening up the email itself.
As far as the site itself goes - it has a clean, simple to understand interface lacks anything sexy to sell the idea. The animation is a great idea, but just seems dry and lacks context. Looking at the "Using Signal" page (https://trysignal.com/using-signal/), I'd say use a screenshot similar to the one there (albeit with the full inbox visible), and show an animation of the email being edited in real time rather than the side by side comparison. That would be a much clearer demonstration and immediately provide the context as to what's happening. In all reality you could just integrate the "Using Signal" page into the main index for the moment as it doesn't have enough information to really constitute a secondary page.
The button concept you describe is very interesting - we have been playing around with NLP for extracting actionable items from email, but we want to make sure it’s accurate before we launch any features that rely on it.
Thanks for the feedback on the website, we’re definitely be changing it up in the coming weeks.
What is this actually doing? I.e. are the emails being edited on the server or is the extension storing a set of edits and applying them when you view the edited emails in Gmail in Chrome? Are the original emails still accessible? How?
We are storing the changes you make to an email and then loading those changes back in when you view that email. The original email is never deleted, you can always click the "Restore" button get back to the original.
Why not use a local datastore on the user's browser, like IndexedDB? I see no reason at all to install this and send my data to your external datastore when the same can be accomplished locally.
I like the idea of re-naming these as a form of mini-notes.
But now that Gmail is getting into providing context for emails (such as flight check-ins), I'd like it if the auto-generated emails could also learn based on summaries I provide. Kind of like a filter rule based on what I've done in the past to re-name the email to what I'm looking for.
Tripit has saved me so much time (and helped my marriage too) by solving this problem. I just started using it this summer when I was doing a lot of international travel.
Now, I just forward the email to tripit and I have an item in my calendar (that is shared with my wife) that has just the relevant info (flight time, number, conf #, etc) so I can see it any time and so can she.
No more looking at those awful emails (which I just archive as soon as I forward it).
I'm a big fan of the Google Now cards that pop-up with live flight details and information like when I have to leave in order to get to check-in on time with current travel conditions. It seems to be getting this straight from my gmail account.
I was thinking of filter controls a la gmail style where I can automatically put things into folders or archive/whatever. More control directly in the hands of the user but still allowing your algorithms to do the heavy lifting.
I'll share an even better approach that works across all devices, allows better todo management and allows you to preserve the original email context.
The first thing you need to know is that an email sent to username+anything@gmail.com is the same as sending it to username@gmail.com. Knowing that you can send all your notes to username+todo@gmail.com and then create a filter to attach a Yellow "TODO" label for any such emails received. You can send yourself reminders from anywhere. You may want to add your "todo" in your address book for convenience.
You can also reply to any email that needs attention and change the recipient to username+todo@gmail.com. If you add a short summary in the first line of the body, it will show in your inbox preview. That email will sit in your inbox vying for your attention and when you open it, you can always refer to the original thread. It's also possible to expand this idea further. For example, you can reply to an existing todo email and add more details. You can also keep a draft email within the same thread where you have rough notes. I have drafts that are a year old attached to todo items. You can mark items complete fairly easily as well. You should have GMail keyboard shortcuts enabled if you don't already.
On a related note, you can also sync your iPhone notes to keep them on GMail. That works out nicely as you always have them backed up online and you can have read-only access to them from anywhere through your GMail account.
I haven't needed anything more for my todo management.
Our goal for this version was to get data synced and saved as quickly as possible. Having firebase as the data store working via websockets made sense.
This is the one thing that has kept me from completely switching to Gmail. However, since these edits are not actually written back to the email, but stored locally (even synced with Signal on other machines), it does no good since the Gmail app on my Android phone and tablet can't see the changes. BE VERY CLEAR you're just editing and storing locally. The original Gmail message unchanged. I combined two emails, deleted one of them, and checked it in the Gmail app. All I see is the original message, but other other is deleted. This will just confuse most people. Unless this can change the message on Gmail, it is useless to me.
Offtopic: the feature I lack is to permanently add some info (like tags) so that email is searchable by some keywords, but I guess that's harder to make (and should be done on gmail side).
I don't think so. Maybe if I'd need it much more, I could somehow come up with greasemonkeying UI to use labels for this, but currently I think labels are more like folders.
Strange. When I open gmail, I have to give permission. I do that, dismiss the dialog, the page refreshes, and I get the same dialog. Over and over again, I think I've given the app my permission like 10 times. And the buttons aren't appearing in my gmail.
Hi there - if you're willing to help us debug your issue, shoot us an email at team@trysignal.com and we'll send you some instructions to get that sorted out asap.
Of course! Once you edit the email you can click on the 'Restore' button (visible inside the email) to display the original and toggle to your changes again by clicking 'Revert'
This interferes with my GMail keyboard shortcuts (presumably because editing mode is on by default when I open an email). There should be some kind of option to make editing mode off by default.
It expands the first conversation for an email conversation. This change in default settings (Gmail by default expands the latest message) is very painful! I un-installed it after 1 hour of usage...
Hey Taylor, we are constantly adding features and fixes to Signal. When we say that priority inbox isn't supported, we only refer to the edits being reflected on the inbox screen. The interface works like normal on the email itself. The preview features for priority inbox should be up in the next few days!
We tried experimenting with having it always be on auto-edit mode (assumed most people don't heavily rely on shortcuts) so we definitely understand that this will interrupt your flow as a power gmail user. We will be pushing the feature to disable auto-edit in the next few days and I'd be more than happy to comment here when it's out :)
A lot of people use their inbox as their todo list, but there's a lot of noise in their emails that they have to parse through every time they check their inbox.
Signal currently allows you to edit the emails in your inbox so you can get rid of irrelevant info (or even add info) as you see fit. We're experimenting with auto summarization (check out the website for an example).
The goal is to make the inbox a better to-do list.
This is not seamless. I don't need to try it to find that out, I just have seen this type of extension enough times to know that it isn't seamless, especially in beta form.
Same question for the tabs and browsing activity permission.