Do you want to spend 3 years of your career reading unnecesary emails?

Key facts (average email user) :

• receives 20 new emails each hour, each day (excluding spam),
• forgets 18% of important emails, and reads 36% of UNimportant emails,
• and spends more than 3 years of his/her career reading unnecessary emails.

Paris-based Startup
Kwaga is simple, free, and works with Gmail to enable you to focus on essential emails and follow-through with key decisions in less clicks.

It's estimated that we will have spent 3 years of our careers reading unnecesary emails. So, what should a virtual email assistant do for you? Which "email overload" eradication feature will Kwaga implement next?

Vote and we'll strive to launch your favourite module for Gmail within the next few months.

Kwaga has developed a software-based personal assistant which helps users cope with email overload as effectively as a human assistant. The system analyzes Gmail text received by the user to extract action-relevant information including new meeting requests, tasks, emails to follow-up on, new telephone numbers.

If you have to do anything besides hit the reply button, it is an action email and the Kwaga email assistant is there to help.

Illustration: Kwaga adds a smart layer to Gmail which displays a series of clickable tags.

Kwaga Email Overload Assistant :: Interview at PayPal.

Kwaga Issue: Gmail Offline mode.

Sorry folks, the Kwaga plugin is not yet compatible with Gmail's offline feature. If you have activated the offline feature, the Kwaga plugin will not function correctly.

So please, either turn off this feature if you're not using it or delete your Kwaga plugin following these simple instructions.

We'll keep you posted when Offline compatibility is resolved :-(

Kwaga Email Assistant Basics: Using Gmail Search.

Did you know that Gmail has a very powerful built-in search engine? For more information on Gmail search parameters.

For example, if you remembered you had received an invitation to our Open Office by email and wanted to find it again, you might use the following search:

"from: kwaga label:kw-invitation after:2009/11/18 before:2009/12/30"

What is label:kw-invitation?
Well, Gmail includes the possibility to search for specific (or all) Gmail labels.

When Kwaga automatically detects Meetings, Invitations, Events, New contacts, Email confirmations, Credentials, For Your Information, Newsletters, Telephone numbers, Passwords, etc... in your emails, it tags by creating a Gmail label that starts with "kw-" and you can easily search for these types of emails.

Review our QuickSheet on Kwaga tags to see how to include Kwaga tags in your Gmail searches.

Kwaga Email Assistant Basics: Icons

Kwaga also detects little bits of valuable information,
displayed as Icons in your Inbox.

Part of a series of quick tutorials to help you get started with the Kwaga email assistant.

These "icons" are genuine Gmail labels simply displayed differently than those you might create yourself. As with any Gmail label you can easily search for all emails automatically tagged by Kwaga, such as telephone numbers by typing: label:kw-phone into the Gmail search bar.

Please click for full-screen & printable view :

Kwaga Email Assistant Basics: Automatic Tags

Part of a series of quick tutorials to help you get started with the Kwaga email assistant.

All emails, automatically tagged by Kwaga, will display a colourful & clickable rectangle in your Inbox.

These "rectangles" are genuine Gmail labels simply displayed differently than those you might create yourself. As with any Gmail label you can easily search for all emails automatically tagged by Kwaga, such as meeting requests by typing: label:kw-meeting into the Gmail search bar.

Please click for full-screen & printable view :

A Lesson on Simplicity.

As Kwaga launches the second-round of product-work, I found this inspiring TechCrunch article about Twitter and product simplicity :



"We live in an age where feature-bloat reigns supreme. Far too many startups replace the word “better” with “more.” That is to say, rather than perfecting the product they have and maintaining a singular focus on what they want to accomplish, they keep adding new features either because rivals are doing them, or because users are suggesting them. This is rarely a good idea. One great feature beats a dozen half-assed ones any day of the week. Keep it simple, stupid."

Also, Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, explains in more detail.

[EN] Kwaga Talks about Email Overload at eBay, PayPal & Gumtree.

Thanks to Dees and Andy at eBay for organising a lovely work session on Friday. Seedcamp winners were given the unique chance to present to nearly 100 eBay employees and field questions. The subject of email overload and Kwaga captured the interest of a great number of people present and I really enjoyed having the time to discuss with everyone.

Look out for more on Heather Taylor's blog at PayPal.

[EN] Using Twitter to Create the Best Email Assistant.

Ok, so I launched our twitter feed 3 months ago thinking Twitter is perhaps a useful medium to reach new people in the world. We received pointers from friends who had tweeted before, but frankly it seemed to me more of a gimmick than truly useful.

I didn't want us to broadcast blindly and loudly about Kwaga in a "spam" like fashion. That hardly seems right for a startup striving to build goodwill and focused on solving the problem of infomania.

What would be interesting is to talk with people who have ideas on improving the email overload problem and who would want to help us create the email assistant they need. I didn't grasp how we could engage our public on Twitter in a meaningful conversation.

I "get" it now!

Thanks to Farhan Rehman and Gemma Cocker I now rather "get" it. To comprehend the sheer massive potential of Twitter I was instructed to first find the conversations on email overload already taking place. Indeed there is a very large community of people sharing their frustrations and solutions to email overload. This is just the sort of community we want to reach and the type of conversations that will help us create the most useful email assistant:

"Must deal with fantastic backlog of email. Some good stuff in there I want to respond to, but I'm caught in Overload Loop. Fixing now."

"How to Manage Email Overload with some help of your RSS Reader."

"A funny (and very true) list of tips on how to manage email and info overload."

It would also be very nice to see all our early Private Beta members on Twitter for real-time product feedback and discussions on email overload in general.

[EN] Software engineer @Gmail explains IMAP.

Kwaga would like to thank Jamie Nicolson for taking the time to write us and explain what happened the other day with Gmail IMAP:

"Unfortunately for us, the press reported the issue as our bug, when in fact we were trying to fix a bug. *sigh*, oh well. We're going to try pushing our change again at some point, but first we want to make an effort to make sure no one will be broken when we try again. It sounds like you guys fixed your code and are good to go.One way you could help us in the future would be by sending the IMAP ID command after you login (RFC 2971). This command is analogous to the user-agent string in HTTP. It lets us see which software we are talking to for a given IMAP session. This way we can keep track of which apps out there are talking to us and how they interact with our server, and we know who to contact about potential problems." - Jamie Nicolson, Software Engineer at Google

[EN] What Have 200 People Said About Email Overload?

Kwaga has been asking its members about email overload and has gathered very valuable information from over 200 email users.

Did you know that the average professional receives more than 20 new emails (excluding spam) each hour of the workday, every day? It's estimated that a manager will have spent 3 and half years reading unneccessary emails in the course of her career.



So we wanted to learn more. When we asked how often people were looking at their emails, over 90% stated that they were almost always connected to their emails and half of those claimed to be "addicted".

More than 80% of people are reading emails directly from their Inboxes.

More than 60% start reading the unread messages that have been received most recently.

Nearly 80% of those surveyed are looking at new collaborative tools to reduce their email communication.

[EN] Make Email Fun Again: Add Meeting requests to your personal calendars.

Kwaga automatically recognizes requests for Meetings in your emails and displays this to you in a smart layer. Even the proposed date is automatically detected from the text of your email!



So go ahead and click once on the blue rectangle in your Gmail thread list. With the Kwaga Action Pane open, click on the add button to automatically enter the proposed date to either your Google Calendar or Apple iCal.

It's that easy!

Don't have Kwaga yet, sign up on http://kwaga.com and we'll send you an invitation number to try-out the early private beta.

[EN] Kwaga Product Icons.

[EN] TechCrunch cites Kwaga's solution to Gmail fix.

Kwaga cited by Lifehacker and TechCrunch on the Gmail marks unread issue.

[EN] Woke up this morning to find that all the mails I received during the night were already marked as read in my Gmail Inbox.

Woke up this morning to find that all the mails I received during the night were already marked as read in my gMail Inbox!

Strange, but I've seen stranger things before, so I grabbed another coffee and headed for Kwaga's office. As soon as I turned on my iMac I found a message on our getSatisfaction site from one of our dear beta users echoing the same problem.

Humm... So I sat down to test and yes indeed since sometime last night, after the Kwaga server treats the body of a mail through its IMAP connection, the mail becomes suprisingly marked as read.

This is obviously not acceptable, so we immediately took our servers offline (with a tweet and a mail to our beta users) and went deep in hacker mode. To resolve this we simply set a parameter (Peek Mode) in IMAP that was previously ignored by Gmail. After validating the fix a few minutes later, thanks to our awesome continuous development framework (thanks Fred), we were able to push a hotfix live and restart our service.

From start to finish, Kwaga was back online in 20 minutes.

I then relaxed and searched on Twitter and it appears others were also impacted when Google modified how it handles IMAP GET MESSAGE BODY. Even mails on my iPhone were effected by this.




Anyway, thank you to our first user who pinged us so that we could correct this in real time. And for all of you IMAP Geeks around the world, set the PEEK mode to TRUE if you get an mail's BODY from Gmail.

[EN] Kwaga celebrates Halloween.

Kwaga celebrates Halloween wearing Kwaga stripes! Painted by the very talented Rachel, known to the stars of Parisian cinema. Thanxs.