Emaily 0.0.2: Google #Wave now sends email - but lots of work ahead to make it usable

I'm happy to announce Emaily version 0.0.2, which now able to send email. This is the first time email can be sent from Google Wave.

But don't be too excited about that, it is still not too useful, it has a lot of limitations. The main problems are:

• You cannot receive answer to the email yet.
• There is no rate-limiting on emails: If you edit a blip and submit it, then it will immediately fire an email to the recipient. When you edit a blip and finish editing, it will send it again, etc. It is a pretty annoying user experience for a user who is participating on a constantly changing wave. This makes me a little bit cautious about publishing it too much, because if people will start spamming with this tool, we have to disable the it until we add some rate limiting to it.

How to test it

First of all, you have to do some work with the email address you want to send the email to:

• Take it apart into two parts: username and domain (the separator is the @ sign), for example for test@example.com the username is test and the domain is example.com .
• Add the emaily-wave+username+domain@appspot.com to your contacts, in our example it would be emaily-wave+test+example.com@appspot.com.

You have to do it exactly this way, it will probably won't work if you do it in an other way:

• Open a new wave with the previously created contact. Don't add multiple email-contacts to the wave, it is not working yet as intended.
• Write your message.
• Click "Done."

The email will arrive to the recipient's mailbox, but he cannot answer to it yet.

You can return and edit the wave, add new blip to it, these operations will generate a new message.

We're working on adding the ability to receive emails, plus rationalize the outgoing emails somehow. A lot of work have to be done on make it more user-friendly also.