Show HN: Launching my humble site, attachcache.com

1 pointsprint14y ago2 comments

Hello,

I've been hacking on a site off and on since early 2010, and now I'm totally out of motivation and ideas, so I'm throwing up my hands (and a URL!) and hoping for some feedback.

This started out as a 100-line python script and grew to something more ambitious. I built the site to scratch my own itch, and because I had a hunch that it might be useful to other people, but now I'm at a technical/spiritual impasse.

The basic idea is to mirror a Gmail account's attachments, and make them instantly searchable/sortable. The original idea was to provide a single email address per user account which can accept and parse attachments (i.e., via forwarding), but I found myself gravitating toward sync. So both sync and email forwarding are currently supported, but I'm not sure how stable it will be under load (or any part of the site, for that matter).

I'm really interested to know if anyone has ideas for more features (I have a few of my own), and also whether you think there is a market for this site. There are definitely bugs, so caveat emptor:

https://attachcache.com

Please try it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Noah

2 comments

angryasian14y ago

wouldn't give you access to my gmail, but the forward seems useful. I already use google docs to index all my documents. I open the attachment in docs, save it and gets indexed. Just wondering in this case whats the benefit to using your service ?

printOP14y ago

Security is definitely a hurdle, but I don't think it's insurmountable.

The main benefit to using Attachcache is greater automation. It sounds like you're doing work to get your attachments filed away. All that opening, closing, context switching adds up over time.

With Attachcache, you can either set up a Gmail "has:attachment" filter to be used in conjunction with Forwarding, or just use Sync. After you've done one of those 2 things, it's a totally hands-free solution:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190

Also, Attachcache Sync is retroactive -- it can mirror my 2k+ emails and 8k+ attachments going back to 2006 in about 10 minutes. Doing this by hand would take a long time.

Hope that explanation helps, and thanks a lot for your comment!

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