I love it when I write about something I need and some developer out there builds it. It happens all the time and it never ceases to amaze me.
This week it happened as a result of my email bankruptcy post. I wrote this in that post:
I have a list of about thirty people who I email with regularly and who are my most important email relationships. I use two web services, Gist and Etacts, to tell me who these people are. Both are useful. I then do gmail searches on their names and make sure that I have no unread and unarchived emails from them. It would be great if one or both of these services could auto-generate a gmail search on all thirty addresses for me. It would be even better if gmail had this feature built into the service.
The team at Etacts read the post and added the exact feature I wanted. I've got the Etacts browser plugin in Chrome and this is what my gmail sidebar looks like now.
Two of those links were inserted by Etacts, the "awaiting reply" link and the "unread from top contacts" link. I don't use the "awaiting reply" functionality in Etacts but the "unread from top contacts" is going to be so huge for me. A couple times a day, I have time for five or ten minutes of email and what I want to see is any incoming email from my top contacts. This Etacts link does exactly that for me.
What is even more awesome is that the definition of top contacts is not hard wired. It will change over time as my email behavior changes. Maybe we sell one of our portfolio companies. That team may fall off of my top thirty list. Maybe we make a new investment. That team may rise onto my top thirty list. So cool.
Thanks Etacts for doing this. You made my week.
