[miles_matthias]

I would use Google groups for this instead of a true newsletter product, but I totally agree with this approach. It's similar thinking to the philosophy behind ctolunches.com.

An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534

My thought:

For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would be awesome.

[Alex3917]

We built some of this functionality for FWD:Everyone, but haven't yet gotten it to a point where it's polished enough to release. One of the issues we ran into is that Gmail translates unicode characters into images, which are then difficult to resize to get them to properly match the surrounding typography.

We also didn't build this as a fully automated service, but rather as something that generates MJML that you then have to compile and embed within an HTML email. But it does let you embed all the replies to an email in a new outgoing email, which you can conceptually see here in this marketing email we sent out:

https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html