ETacts (YC W10) will help you manage your relationships

I want this very, very badly. But they'd have to pay me a thousand dollars to get me to type my Google password in that box.

<p><pre><code> (Why this is safe) </code></pre> <i>We use the latest in bank-level 256-bit SSL encryption to protect your information, and your passwords are securely encrypted.</i><p><i>Etacts will never email your contacts without your permission.</i><p><i>Your data is completely private and will not be shared with other users.</i><p><i>To help you keep track of who you haven't spoken with, we fetch your email headers. We don't store the content of your emails or attachments. When you view an email in etacts, we fetch the email directly from your Gmail server and don't store it on our servers.</i><p>Uh. Hey, Etacts. Are you storing my password long term or not? That's my question. Glad you're doing the bank security encrypty thing. But you can't keep my Gmail password.

I think its a good idea; instead of going after email overload as a whole, go after a sub problem that it creates.<p>Please, fix the lander. It looks way too close to <a href="http://www.getballpark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.getballpark.com/</a> but only worse. If the metalab guys haven't tweeted about it yet, they definitely will. If you need some tips about it just send me a note jay (at) anomalyinnovations.com.

I hate to say this, but this would be an ideal addition to "labs" in gmail. I can't imagine it would take much for them to do either.

Small product nit: I think you weight older messages too highly.<p>#1 on my list is my girlfriend (cool). #2 is my co-founder from my last company (also cool). #3 is my dad.<p>#4 is my ex-girlfriend, and it's telling me to email her (fail).

This is a very useful feature but I dont think it'll work as a standalone product.<p>I'm guessing they are probably targeting gmail first so that they get bought out by Google if they get a ton of users.

A lot of people are expressing concern about having to give you their Gmail password. Have you considered implementing an offline scanner for desktop clients that would then upload the contact and frequency information to your severs through SSL? You could then overlay your services in Thunderbird's/Outlook's/Mail's desktop interfaces.<p>That kind of kills the convenience of the service, but personally I would accept that for increased security.

I love this idea, but it doesn't seem to handle Unicode properly. All my contacts written in Hangul show up like "=?Euc-Kr?B?Sejh/Ly3?=" :(

Feedback: when I log in for the first time, I don't really have any prompts, and I'm not sure what I should do, or why I should do it. I'm thinking something like "Do you want to email XXX -- you used to talk to them a lot, and it's been a while." If you can help me along the path from "I just signed in" to "ETacts just helped me!", that would be awesome.

I thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate every medium a person uses for it to be really useful.<p>I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.

<a href="http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/" rel="nofollow">http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/</a>

Precisely what i've been looking for. Thought Gist was a solution. They got it wrong, you guys got it right.Was actually planning on building this for myself.<p>I hate feature creep too, but important:<p>1. Company pages for company e-mails<p>2. Merging contacts<p>3. how to smartly import facebook and linkedin like gist does i.e. keep the people with companies, chuck the rest.<p>4. Updating/removing accounts etc needs some QA

Hot shit! This was something on my list of things to build for myself. Now I don't have to.

Wow! I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but way more useful than what I was going to do. What I had in mind was just a Google Reader Trends but for email (showing you when you received/read email by day, time of day, day of week, etc visually).<p>Having graphs in etacts would be nice, but I think you nailed the really important features! Now I just have to wait for the solution to the password problem. A desktop application, while less convenient than a web app, would still be awesome, and could even be made a portable install I take around on a USB stick.

The external UI looks like Picwing and Etherpad had a baby.

The feeling I get when etacts shows me my most important contacts is like the feeling I get when I see a tag cloud of my tweets. Insightful meta data.

Site looks great. You've got some gradient drop-offs on both the right and left sides.<p>If you can't see it, here's a method I use:<p>Paste a screenshot in photoshop. Hit Ctrl+U and turn the saturation all the way up. Then change the hue so the whole site looks orange or green (the eye tends to blur blue together). You'll more easily notice where the gradients are cut off.

I love the idea of this. Can't wait to see more. I also wish it didn't have to store my password.

Awesome is the word I would use to describe it. And it reassured me that the people I think should be important to me are the people important to me.

Did not work for me. Took 10+ minutes to load the People tab. Then showed only 1 contact. I had emailed this contact last year to sell something.

Gmail made me change my password due to suspicious activity

were the screenshots with internal YC emails intentional?

Hey guys,<p>I had an idea for a work-around for you for people who don't want to give their password. What if BCCing myaccount@etacts.com updated your info? Doesn't seem like it'd be hard to implement. I'd use the service if it had that feature, it looks <i>really</i> good. I think you guys are doing something really needed and cool, cheers and good luck,<p>Sebastian

Gist.com?

are you interested in selling a stand-alone server license?

Facebook is doing this already, and gmail can add it in no time. Not a good prospect for ETacts.