[rmassie]

The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication.

My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I get my monthly statements for banks and investments and where my notifications go. When replacing e-mail you would need to service all these components of what e-mail is.

The thing that originally made e-mail so important was it's identity factor. That seems to have withered away as other services have replaced some components of what e-mail was for.

I would argue that e-mail needs to not be replaced, just reclaimed. My e-mail client (web or otherwise) should know that an e-mail in this case is actually just a twitter DM notification and be smart about how it presents that to me. It should know that something from Bank of America is probably something I want to keep, but something else from Bank of America is just marketing junk.

I haven't seen anything that is smart enough to do that on it's own. I don't want to have to deal with creating filters - it should just know. I would totally switch from gmail if this were out there.

[harryh]

> for many people it's just a receipt box

There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable catalog of all my receipts.

I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)

[mappu]

Give a third party my password so it can scan my email for financial data? No thanks.

I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI..

Might be feasible as a client-side app. How about a Thunderbird/Outlook addon with a subscription service for known filters?

(What is the Google Chrome of desktop mail clients, anyway? Hardly any seem to use WebKit.)

[jarek]

Re: the first part, I'm reminded of this web application called Mint.com...

[adriand]

> I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)

But would you pay for it? If so, there is a way to generate almost infinite revenue with this service, which is to charge a small fee for each receipt stored. Naturally, when receiptbox.com charges this fee, it issues a receipt, which it emails to you...

[harryh]

You don't need to charge me. You're getting information about everything I'm buying online (which increasingly means...everything I'm buying period).

Predict what I want to buy next and take a cut of the purchase.

[tomjacobs]

https://www.expensify.com/help/receipts/email

[Nervetattoo]

A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader. If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate.

If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.

If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.

Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.

So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.

[miguelos]

That's exactly what I'm planning to build! I'm not sure if I should go hybrid or all-in.

By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).

The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.

[angryasian]

there were sites like this , swipely and blippy.. both failed as I don't think people in general are ok with giving out their purchases information... I'm really against giving permission to anyone for my email.

[dwynings]

https://www.goslice.com/

[gpl1]

Try otherinbox.com