Open Source and the iPhone

As reMail's Gabor Cselle notes in his blog post today, open-sourcing this app will hopefully allow other developers to take some of the app's core features (handling IMAP, attachments etc.) and use it for their own ideas without having to reinvent the wheel. If You are interested in getting in touch with Cselle about using the source code, head over to the reMail Google Group.

Currently, there are only a few open source iPhone applications on the market. The most well-known open source iPhone project is probably the WordPress iPhone app.

The news was announced by ReMail CEO Gabor Cselle on his blog today (we learned about it first via CenterNetworks). Gabor was a former Gmail intern and was YCombinator funded. There are even more interesting elements to this story than that, though.

1. The Reboxed application that sorts your contacts by priority was really interesting. It was like a little game that scrolled through your contacts, displayed two at a time and asked you to prioritize one over the other. Your individual ratings and the aggregate ratings of particular email contacts across all ReBoxed users were then used to bring emails from high-priority senders to the top of your inbox. It was a really fun little feature. While many data-centric startups would have just picked up email prioritization based on implicit behavior (whose emails you open and reply to) there was something to be said for allowing explicit rankings in a game-like setting. Whose emails are more important to you, your boss's or your mom's?
   


2. That Google just bought something that's all about one of the iPhone's core functions, email, is interesting. Sure, the app is shuttered now, but imagine if Apple had decided to buy ReMail instead. If Cselle was working on the iPhone's native email application, that would have been better for Apple than this may turn out to be if he helps make Android's email the best in the mobile world.


3. ReMail's founder was previously a VP of Engineering at the very ambitious Outlook plug-in provider Xobni. He left Xobni and ended up creating something very different. Cselle says he had a "multi-step plan for global email domination" but received advice "that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful." The end result? "It worked," he says.


4. The man that gave him that advice and invested in his company, was Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail.


5. Finally, Google just acquired a native mobile app, built on another platform. Much has been made of Google's emphasis on moving everything to HTML5 and the mobile web. But here's evidence that you can build an innovative application in an entirely different direction and still capture the company's eye. (Admittedly it probably helps to be super connected like Cselle was.)

I'm not sure it's going to work as it's implemented so far - but it sure is interesting.

Then you're shown 20 pairs of contacts who have sent you email recently and asked which sender in each pair tends to send the most important emails. In addition to prioritizing one over the other you can also designate one of the contacts as always high-priority, mark them as a non-human source for placement in a bulk sender box or say that you don't recognize either name.

You aren't allowed to say that the two contacts are of equal importance. Cselle says he wants everyone to be forced to choose. Sometimes that's hard.

All of the prioritized contacts are then analyzed from all users in anonymous aggregate to determine the general priority level of senders. In theory this means that even after choosing between only 40 people, you can benefit from everyone else's list of 40 as well.

The end result is a new window into your Gmail inbox. Your emails are more or less chronological there, but bulk senders are separated and your priorities, presumably with some influence from everyone else's priorities, also influence the order things are displayed in.

There's a whole lot of other ways this aggregate data could be parsed as well. There's a lot of potential here.

Why This Might Not Work

This system of prioritization is reminiscent of something Yahoo is working on, part of a larger initiative the company calls Inbox 2.0. That system works primarily through analysis of passive signals, though. It sees whose emails you click to read and who you send email to most often. It also allows you to designate people as particularly important.

ReBoxed has a lot of potential, but if it relies on explicit prioritization it's hard to imagine that scaling. In my tests I also had a lot of my 40 sender slots taken up by blog commenters, something that's less useful than personal emails. Perhaps a more sophisticated system of filtering would help with that. Update: I see now that there is an option to go back and "play the voting game" again. That's good.

I'd feel more inclined to use a system that provided a superior UI over Gmail's, asked me to prioritize senders through occasional prompts and relied extensively on monitoring which emails I clicked on. It might be helpful as well to make calls to my Google Profile and profiles elsewhere around the web to identify contacts that are important enough to me to include on many different networks.

It might not work - but after only 3 days of coding there's still a whole lot of room for innovation here. The use of crowdsourced prioritization is really interesting. If I were to get an email from ReadWriteWeb founding editor Richard MacManus for the first time for example, I'd love to have that message flagged for my attention based on lots of other people saying that Richard sends important emails. That's really cool.

ReBoxed is a small project that presumably could become a part of Cselle's larger email startup company, ReMail. That service is yet to launch but if this is the kind of creativity that will be included there, we're excited to see it.

Word of ReBoxed's launch is floating around the social webs but credit for the mention that led to this post goes to Atul Arora on Twitter.