Hey HN. I decided to build forlater.email after frustration with existing read-later services. They all want me to create an account, or install an app.<p>Somewhat inspired by rss2email, I decided to build forlater -- a bookmarking/read-later service you can use via email. Send a link to save@forlater.email (subject doesn't matter!), and get a readable version of it in your inbox. Email is especially useful here because you can organize it however you like, and gives the you -- the user -- full control of your data, no account required.<p>I've been dogfooding it, and it's super handy. Here's what a saved page looks like on FairEmail (Android): <a href="https://x.icyphox.sh/B8J4o.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://x.icyphox.sh/B8J4o.jpg</a><p>Getting the HTML email template was surprisingly hard. You have to write HTML like it's 1999: <table>s and inline styling. For plaintext, I'm using the oh-so-handy 'lynx'.<p>Finally, it's all free software: <a href="https://github.com/forlater-email" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/forlater-email</a> (or <a href="https://git.icyphox.sh/forlater" rel="nofollow">https://git.icyphox.sh/forlater</a>)<p>Rest assured, you can be sure that forlater isn't going anywhere. It costs me very little (for now) to run, and I'm its biggest user. I plan to make it more self-hosting friendly and write some docs for the same.<p>Until then, thanks for checking it out!
> forlater is an email-based bookmarking service. You send us an email with a link (or links), and receive a readable, clutter-free version of the article in an email.<p>This is an awesome concise straight-to-the-point summary (which is harder to achieve than it looks).<p>> This is a “paid service” — you just pay how much ever you want via Liberapay. I insist that you try it out before you do; you can better gauge how much value you derive from forlater. It’s completely fine if you don’t want to pay too!<p>Love it. Such a great approach.
Interesting idea, I like it.<p>The biggest problem I see is that this is going to (eventually) be used by spammers.<p>I can send a mail with a FROM anywhere with a link. That link will be advertising for something, and your service will mail it off to some unsuspecting person.<p>This means your mail server's reputation will end up being black listed everywhere.<p>Enforcing DKIM/SPF validation would help a lot (but not perfect). I verified that you are not currently doing any validation today. I was able to spoof my gmail address from my residential IP. You do not have very long to fix it before it gets abused.
Took me a moment to realize that it’s “for later”, because we have a verb in Norwegian “å forlate” which means “to forgive”, and in one of its forms, it is called “forlater” (“forgives”).<p>Name is perfectly fine though, don’t get me wrong :)
Congrats on launching!<p>I like the idea. However, I’m a big Pocket user and can’t help but notice that this way of bookmarking takes significantly more effort than sharing to Pocket or clicking on the Pocket extension.<p>What’s the benefit over Pocket outside of not having to install an app/extension ?
Love the idea. Tested with Microsoft 365, Google Apps and iCloud account.<p>Only the Google account surfaced the saved mail in the inbox. MS365 put it to junk. On iCloud it does not surface at all.