New #Emaily release: 0.3 - manual send, incoming email threading, new participant icon. #googlewave #wave

Finally, Emaily 0.3 and some long-awaited changes are ready! In the last month, we have improved Emaily by:

• Adding the possibility of manual sending (blip-by-blip, no automatic emails). You just have to uncheck the "Automatic send" checkbox, and in the new or edited blips, a "Send" button will appear. By clicking it, it will initiate the email sending.
• Fixing the bug with accented, cyrillic, chinese, etc. (not plain US) e-mail subject encoding problem. (now you'll see "УРА, работает" instead of "???, ????????").
• Support for threading of incoming emails. Your emails will appear as a new blip if they are answered by the email recipients. They won't always open new waves from now. (Credits for this goes to Christophe!)
• Changing icon for email participants (to make it easier for you to distinguish email recipients from the robot itself). Note, that it is not the final icon, but better than the previous one.
• Reduced the database and CPU usage of emaily when you have multiple email users on a wave.

Please take a look at the open issues page, vote for your favorite feature (or bug), and then they'll be implemented/fixed earlier.

We know that Emaily is still in an early stage, there are some missing features which we would like to address. There are also known issues, especially sometimes strange participants appear in the waves which Emaily creates (vote for this bug here).

Besides these, we have plans for improvements, too:

• Adding the possibility to autocomplete email addresses from the user's addressbook. This is not that easy that it seems (vote for this here).
• Add HTML email support for receiving and for sending also (vote for this here).
• Add attachment sending/receiving (vote for this here).

If you did not find your favorite feature or you encountered a bug, please open a new issue.

We express our deeeeeeep gratitude to all who helped us in finding bugs and using Emaily. Guys, without you we would not have had such progress! Thanks all of you and keep going!

Enjoy using Emaily!

Best regards,

Guru & Balázs

representing the Emaily team.

Emaily short news: version 0.2.2: bugfix release; publicity, community; in the works #emaily #googlewave #wave

I'm happy to announce the new version of Emaily: 0.2.2, the new homepage, some community news, and what are in the works.

Emaily 0.2.2:

There are not too many user visible changes in this release, it is mainly about bugfixing. If you are interested about the technical details, here they are:

• We did not store the wave-id to the wavelets, just the wavelet-id. I assumed it is unique, but it turned out that there are many wavelet ids that are the same, so we actually ended up an almost unusable database. Now in this release, we will start storing the wave-id, so each wavelet is actually unique.
• Some cleanup happened in the email-receiving code.
• The datastore tricked me a little: I assumed that if I set a field to null, then it won't match a given numeric query (less than a number), but I was wrong. The result of this mistake was that every time the robot checked for emails to send, it looked through the whole database. Over time, one call consumed more and more CPU, and became slower and slower. The fix was easy, and now it works well.
• There was a bug in the robot API, which made the robot fail and forget to record the changes in its state when a blip is deleted. This was probably caused by some recent change, because earlier we did not have this problem. I made a workaround for that, so this is also working fine.
• Added an empty robot page in http://emaily-wave.appspot.com, which redirects to the homepage (http://emaily.dlux.hu).

I hope this release will be much more stable than before.

New homepage

Well, not actually new, but the informations are updated. I hope the usage is easy enough now for most people to use it.

Publicity, community

I opened a wave for questions and feature requests. If you did not know about that yet, check the new homepage for the link. (I don't want to write the link here, because it might change in the future. The reason is that it is getting pretty slow to load: 132 blips currently). Feel free to contribute!

Arpit wrote a nice review about Emaily, you can check it here! Thank you very much!

l3reak has a step by step description of Making Google Wave work with E-mail & facebook. Very extensive description on how to use Emaily! Good work, thank you!

In the works

We are working on two major things, and I hope we can get it done soon:

Manual sending:

Emaily currently sends unedited blips after about one minute, but some people prefer pressing the "Send" button instead.

Maybe you want to write a very important email to your love, your landlord or your boss: you don't want Emaily to rush you, do you?

Threading:

Now Emaily creates a new wave from all your incoming messages, but a conversation-like user experience would be much better: We'll create a new blip instead of a new wave when a reply comes from an email user.

If you are interested in the updates about emaily, subscribe to my twitter (dluxhu) or to the "emaily" label in my blog.

Emaily 0.2.1: Easier to use email sending in Wave #emaily #googlewave #wave

This weekend was pretty busy in the Emaily world!

Christophe and me also worked on things, and we incorporated the first change from Karan, too. Some of them you can see already, some of them are coming in the next week(s)!

The biggest news is that you don't need to manually encode the email address anymore if you want to send an email to someone with Emaily.

Here is how to use Emaily now:

• Add emaily-wave@appspot.com to your contact list.
• Click on the contact entry, select "New Wave".
• It will create a new wave with you and Emaily in it.
• The robot will add a blip at the end of the Wave, and an input box where you can add email participants with their email address. It will do the hard work for you to convert their email address to Wave participants. No more manual work. You will see that the new recipients will show up in the recipients list.
• After you finished, you can leave the blip as is, or you can even remove it.

Features to come in the next releases:

• Make Emaily an extension: how about a "New Email" button to make things even easier?
• Threading: do you want the answers in the same wave as you sent the first email from? We want that, too!

Enjoy!

Emaily release: 0.1.1: Bugfix. ~1500 emails are sent out daily. #wave #googlewave

New weekend, new Emaily release. Not too much visible change in version 0.1.1, just a small bugfix, which made emails queue up. If you just got your email which you sent a couple of days ago, then this is why it happened. :)

About ~1500 emails are sent out daily with Emaily now. This is a big number given that it is just a very early version!

Spread the word, use this robot!

In the next weeks we're going to work on more usability features. If you have a feature request, feel free to send it!

Emaily 0.1: Google #wave now sends and receives email #googlewave

We are sending and receiving emails, too!

This is a major breakthrough even if the code is in a very early stage.

Changes:

• Now it does not send emails right after you submit a blip, it intelligently waits a little before sending. It even collects multiple blip changes into one email.
• Email receiving is activated. You will get new waves from emails which are answered to your wave outgoing email address. (which is: yourusername+googlewave.com@emaily-wave.appspotmail.com). The code for this is made by Christophe.

Please note that the version number is 0.1, so many things are still not working, but we are working on them. These are:

• Threading: incoming emails always create a new wavelet. In the future versions, if you get an email answer to a wave, then it will just create a blip.
• Answering to the wavelet's address. Every wavelet has an email address, and whenever someone answers to that address, it is currently not working. Emaily uses it as an outgoing email address if an email contains changes from multiple people.
• HTML emails.
• Receiving emails automatically. Currently wave creation is triggered only when someone does something in a wave where the robot is a participant. This is the limitation of the API, but if many people will use the robot, it is not going to be a problem. So if you are testing Emaily, and trying to receive emails, just open a wave which contained an email recipient, edit a blip and press "Done" without changing the content. It will trigger creating wavelets from emails.
• Sending emails from your username@googlewave.com. We cannot send emails from your email address currently because of security. We're trying to figure out how it would be possible.

Redirecting emails to your wave box email address

If you are brave enough, you can redirect all your emails to your wavebox. In GMail, go to Settings / Forwarding and POP/IMAP, select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to ...", write your wave incoming email address there: yourusername+ googlewave.com@emaily-wave.appspotmail.com. Select "keep GMail's copy in inbox" if it was not selected.

Note, that I DO NOT suggest this yet, but you can give it a try.

Happy Waving!

Balázs & Christophe