Please drop a comment below or email me: rich@tray.io, I'd love to hear of any specific functionality you'd like to see in the product, or generally any thoughts on our approach.
nb we are taking a lean approach to help validate the idea so your feedback is crucial!
We would never store any of your emails on our servers, we would only store your oauth token/secret (with Gmail) or your login details (if using another provider).. The rules engine would be a black box where the email simply goes in one side and actions are triggered out the other side so to speak...
Do you support sending text messages natively, or is that covered as a 3rd party webhook/service?
Are you able to read subject lines and take action based on them?
Text message support will be native using twilio, and we are also planning native mobile apps to perhaps integrate more deeply with push notifications etc.
As for emails, we are able to read all of the email content including headers, and as a user you will have the ability to trigger actions based on any sort of regular expression as well.
Again these are specific uses of the platform, having the ability to analyse your mail and act on it regardless of clients/device opens up a lot of options for really putting your inbox to work.
Getting feedback from HN is vital in helping us shape the beta.
[1] http://postmarkapp.com/inbound [2] http://mailgun.com [3] http://mailnuggets.com
Based on the three use cases you describe on the website (I dont know... there may be more?), if this product took off, Google could kill it by adding time-based filters and availability-based filters (which could possibly tie in with a user's GTalk's status).
The features we've adding on the landing page are examples of how it can be used, rather than specifics.
I'd love for it to put attachments into Dropbox (maybe sort by sender or file type).
If the message is under a certain amount of characters then text it to me by Twilio and I'll reply.
If I don't read a message from my boss after a certain amount of time call me.
For Gmail users we can use XOauth, which helps, but for other services we will have to store login details somewhere. We are currently working on a way of encrypting the passwords that are stored in case of security breaches, but its definitely not an easy task at the moment (our private alpha is just using Gmail users).
Edited: wrong response :)
Such as deep integration with other services, which you hint at with the use of 'pocket'.
