Now that my batch at the Recurse Center is over, I’m planning to build
some products that I’ve had on the backburner. The first one is a
collaborative email blacklist.
I cofounded a company back in 2012. We incorporated, bought a domain, got some press, then raised venture money and got a lot more press. And each step of the way, the volume of cold marketing emails we received grew. And it sorta made me angry.
I got in the habit of blocking the domains of the senders through our Google Apps settings – that way they couldn’t email any of our employees.
And now for kicks (ok maybe out of spite), I’m building a shared blacklist – so if one user blacklists a sender, that sender will be blocked from emailing all the other users
as well. It raises a question about how to
do this without blocking important emails – I think there are
intuitive answers to that, and it’ll be fun to explore.
One of my goals is to do it with as little code as I can manage, since most of the interesting work right now is on the product/user experience side (signup and onboarding, especially). I have it working with a few Google Cloud Functions and Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Datastore. I’d really like to avoid building a full internal admin interface, so I’m playing around with AirTable as a frontend but it might not meet my needs.
Getting started with GCF (and jumping straight into node.js) has been an adventure, but I’m making progress. More details to come on the tech
side of things in a future post.
Recursers – if you’re interested in this please hit me up on Zulip.