Sunday, October 4, 2009

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.

19 comments:

  1. I tested It but It´s not working.

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  2. How did you try exactly? Can you add me (dlux.hu@googlewave.com) to the wave where you've tried it so that I can help debugging it?

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  3. did not work for me either.. did exactly as described..

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  4. Mmm. Interesting. If you contact me directly on wave, I can help debugging it. Otherwise please wait for a couple weeks, we are working on a version which can send and receive emails also.

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  5. Works well for me! I tried with my own e-mail address and no issue. Although it is true it's annoying we receive an e-mail every time "something" happens in the wave :)

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  6. Finally some success report. :) Yes, we are working on the scheduling issue: it won't send an email after every blip. The idea is that it should be configurable at some point...

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  7. Worked fine for me.

    Can't wait to see reply functionality working. Any idea what the lead time on that might be?

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  8. Hi Kryptykfysh! Thanks for the response. I hope we can get it ready in 1-2 weeks. It won't support threading yet, so it means that it will create a new wave for each message. Note, that the Wave API does not support robot-originated events, so you have to actually press a button to receive emails in Wave for now.

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  9. Interesting robot. Still haven't tested it yet. Since you have to adjust the address to test Emaily where to send the email, can the other participants get notifications as well?

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  10. Hi WKanaday, I am not sure I understand the question. You don't need to adjust any email address, you just have to add a new contact.

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  11. Got that now. Thanks.

    It seems that emaily sends an email every once in awhile, but certainly not for every blip. What would cause this? Should I just invite you into my wave?

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  12. I think we figured it out finally. :)

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  13. well, it is now working with the following characteristics: root blip is subject of mail. second blip is message. if you edit second blip then the updated blip is sent again (sometimes even several times). The root blip only accepts ascii, the second also utf-8 but not gadgets (I tried to send a gadgest which resulted in 14 mails with no added content). All further blips are not part of the mail..

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  14. This is a very interesting problem. But we are almost ready with the 0.1 version, so stay tuned, it is going to work differently (I hope it will be better :) ).

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  15. Ok, but how could I use it, if I've got username in format "name+digits". For example, for livejournal posting via mail the form is username+PIN@post.livejournal.com

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  16. Should not be a problem. Try: emaily-wave+username+PIN+post.livejournal.com@appspot.com

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  17. This is great. Thanks for working on this.

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  18. stopped working....

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  19. It might happen because of the usage. The quota of sending emails is 2000 per day, and as I see, it might have exceeded that.

    I'll try to get more quota...

    Balázs

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