Hey HN, I've been working on a problem that had me annoyed since a long while. The fact that our email continues to be unorganized, cluttered, and fatiguing even today, is quite surprising tbh. Even the "modern" clients today simply put our emails in a table, support a few keyboard shortcuts, a few simple features, and are done. The newer ones provide AI-based compose assist, and the newest ones now want us to prompt for everything! That seems backwards. By the time you'll type "find that marketing agency's latest invoice from last Tuesday," you would've already spent more time and effort than you should've needed to.
There is still *no higher order classification, no deeper grouping*. Every email — a project update, a transaction, a human message; appears the same. Key attachments are always elusive when needed. *Trivial auto-updates crowd us*, and *long forwarded threads are still painful to follow with the untidy nature of their chaining.*
I'm sure I am not the only one who found this irritating!
So I built Faraday to finally solve email for good. It uses a classification and extraction pipeline on every incoming email before it has even arrived for the user. *No prompts, no triggers.* It does 3 things automatically:
*1. Higher-order classification:* Is this a Linkedin update, a transaction, a human conversation, an OTP, a booking confirmation? Not just "primary vs promotions" — actual semantic classification with ~30 distinct categories and sub-groups. And then the sub-categories are ordered basis what's best for them. Who cares about the chronology within 40 newsletters from last week. The genres and the brands across them are more important.
*2. Contextual extraction:* Relevant content in most emails is roughly just 12% of the total text. It extracts that (amounts, dates, names, actions, codes - different for different email types) and surface it at the top, so you get the meat upfront.
*3. Thread reconstruction: *Email threads are just terribly nested blockquotes. Faraday reconstructs and reassembles them into a clean, ordered conversation tree. This one is really quite slick.
A bunch of things were difficult to do here. Making all three layers work simultaneously across the spread of our email content, at inbox speeds, with optimum resource utilization, without a single training signal from the user. No setup or onboarding. To work as soon as you login. Super tricky to build.
Meanwhile, also ensured that *it is privacy-first*, doubling down on the best possible security and encryption standards (AES 256) right from the onset.
There are genuinely some nifty technical innovations in Faraday (enough to have even filed 2 patents for them:)
It works on top of all Gmail and Outlook accounts. It's live, compliance-approved, out-of-beta and a lot of people (who were earlier hooked on superhuman, spark) are now using this :)
Happy to go deep on any part of the architecture that you find interesting. Do try it: https://faraday.email (2-week free trial, and much inexpensive after)
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835218
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