[HN Gopher] Show HN: Unattach - free up your Google storage by r...
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Show HN: Unattach - free up your Google storage by removing Gmail
attachments
Hello HackerNews! I have a full-time job, but love building
productivity tools in my spare time. Some time ago, my dad told me
that his Gmail account was full and asked whether I could help. I
built a simple app for him, and later decided to make it into a
product. With the recent news that Google is discontinuing free
storage for photos, more and more people are facing a similar
problem. Unattach (https://unattach.app) is a desktop app for
downloading and/or removing Gmail attachments from many emails at
once. You can use it to free up your Google storage, which is
shared between Gmail, Photos and other Google apps. For most
people, using Unattach is cheaper than buying more Google storage;
for tech-savvy users, it's free. The hardest thing about Unattach
has been balancing user trust and commercial potential. The app
requires edit permissions to the user's Gmail account in order to
remove attachments. Therefore, it is important to establish trust
between myself and the user. Many users felt significantly more at
ease if they could build the app from source (or at least knowing
that they could), in addition to the app being certified by Google.
On the other hand, the more revenue I receive from the app, the
more incentive I have to continue supporting it. The model I ended
up with involves sharing the source code (under a restricted Shared
Source license: https://github.com/rokstrnisa/unattach), so tech-
savvy users can build and run it for free, and offering pre-built
installers for a fee. That is, the software is free and the source
is shared (though it's not "open source"), and users pay for the
convenience of installers. The model has been working reasonably
well. Users of Unattach are generally very happy with it, so I
wanted more people to know about it. I launched the app on
ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/unattach) earlier
today, and am now sharing it with HackerNews. Happy to answer any
questions you may have!
Author : strnisa
Score : 10 points
Date : 2021-05-23 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| anishjain2000 wrote:
| is this possible to make this as webiste
| strnisa wrote:
| I believe that it would be possible to make it into a website,
| yes.
|
| The main reason why I haven't gone this way is because of the
| trust issue, which most users care about. At the moment, user
| data flows only between the Google servers and the user's local
| computer, which is easy to check. With the website, it's harder
| for the user to know that the Unattach server doesn't store
| private data.
|
| In addition, it's more complicated for a web application to
| store data to the local filesystem.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I really cleaned out Gmail a couple of months ago and all I had
| to do was to filter for attachments over a specific size. How
| much different is your app?
| strnisa wrote:
| The main benefit of using Unattach over simply deleting the
| emails is that you can keep all the other parts of your emails
| in your Gmail server. These are often valuable, don't take much
| space and can continue to be searched. Unattach also provides
| various facilities to make finding and storing attachments in
| custom directory structures easy.
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(page generated 2021-05-23 23:03 UTC)