[ANN] 9cays - A Rails app for Group Email

Rails
1

Even though it’s a little OT, I thought I’d announce the free public
beta of a new Rails app that I’ve been working on for a while:

  http://9cays.com

Think of it as mini-mailing list software. For a lot of smallish
conversations, normal mailing list are too heavyweight (requiring
setup, moderation, admin, etc.), but group email is a pain because
messages fly everywhere, people miss out on some, other people don’t
want them but keep getting them…

The description of how to start a new 9cays conversation from the web
site:

First of all, you need to sign up to 9cays if you haven’t already.

Then just email the people you’d like to include in the
conversation, and add the email address [email protected] in either the
To or Cc field.

9cays will create a new email address for the conversation, and set
up a web page to hold all the messages. We’ll then email you with
the conversation details, and send an invitation to each of the
participants.
You can invite more people just by Cc-ing them in on any email to the
conversation’s address, and there’s a link in the bottom of every
email that lets you leave the conversation whenever you want.

It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I’d love to hear any
comments from anyone who wants to give it a try.

One thing worthy of note: there’s an obvious comparison to be made
with CampFire. You could say that 9cays is for email what CampFire is
for instant messaging. The interfaces even look remarkably similar.
(For those who are wondering, we started work on 9cays about six
months ago, and I hadn’t seen CampFire until a few days ago, so it is
just a case of converging design for similar apps, and 37signals
ideas generally influencing our design.) I’d like to think that
CampFire and 9cays will compliment each other quite well.

And finally I’d like to say a big thanks to 37signals, DHH, and the
Rails community in general. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed
developing apps this much.

Cheers,

Pete Y.

2

Nice work!

b

3

Bit of an assumption, but spammers will likely target the emails:

conversation-([0-9]+)@9cays.com

with messages. Curious if and how you might have solved this?

-Nb

 Nathaniel S. H. Brown                           http://nshb.net
4

Sweet :slight_smile:

Meant to say this before my question, but it looks like a really nicely
done
app.

-Nb

 Nathaniel S. H. Brown                           http://nshb.net
5

Nathaniel,

On 14/02/2006, at 2:34 PM, Nathaniel S. H. Brown wrote:

Bit of an assumption, but spammers will likely target the emails:

conversation-([0-9]+)@9cays.com

with messages. Curious if and how you might have solved this?

Conversations aren’t open. We only process email to a conversation’s
address from registered participants of a conversation, and the only
way you can become a participant is to have an existing participant
invite you.

Pete Y.

6

Hi,

On 2/14/06, Pete Y. [email protected] wrote:

participants.
You can invite more people just by Cc-ing them in on any email to the
conversation’s address, and there’s a link in the bottom of every
email that lets you leave the conversation whenever you want.

This is really really nice! I was thinking about the same kind of
interaction for a small application I’m going to build so it’ll be nice
to
view how the two compares in the end.

What is important of such approach is that it is a good way to capture
many
of the casual interactions which happens so frequently on the net. Ease
of
use and low barriers to partecipate are too often overlook in many
systems.

bye
Luca

7

On 14/02/2006, at 3:00 PM, Nathaniel S. H. Brown wrote:

Meant to say this before my question, but it looks like a really
nicely done
app.

Thanks! It’s certainly coming along. We’re using it as a base to test
some ideas and build up some useful code that’s going to go towards
some other projects, so stay tuned. (We should have a blog set up
pretty soon.)

Pete Y.

8

On 15/02/2006, at 9:57 PM, Luca M. wrote:

This is really really nice! I was thinking about the same kind of
interaction for a small application I’m going to build so it’ll be
nice to view how the two compares in the end.

What is important of such approach is that it is a good way to
capture many of the casual interactions which happens so
frequently on the net. Ease of use and low barriers to partecipate
are too often overlook in many systems.

Thanks! That’s exactly what we’re going for: trivial setup and no admin.

As an experiment to make it even more trivial to start a
conversation, we’ve made a plugin for Mail.app on OS X that adds a
button to the toolbar. (It also does a couple of other things behind
the scenes to make the experience nicer for those you invite into the
conversation.)

For those who use Mail.app on OS X 10.4, you can grab the plugin here:

http://homepage.mac.com/yandell/9caysPlugin-0.1.dmg

Cheers,

Pete.