Brief

Brief

Stop yourself from sending wordy, rambling emails

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Long emails are no fun to read or write. Brief is a Chrome extension that adds a word counter to the compose and reply views in Gmail and disables sending if an email is longer than 125 words. Need to send something longer than 125 words? Just triple-click the send button!
Brief gallery image
Launch tags:Chrome Extensions•Email•Productivity
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What do you think? …

Ryan Hoover
Product Hunt
Succinct, clear writing is underrated. Ironically, a book called Brief was posted on Product Hunt a year ago to also help people write more succinctly. 😊
Joost Schuur
Jeff Deutsch
@rrhoover It would be ironic if the book was super long, otherwise it's my understanding it would just be a coincidence
Povilas Sidaravicius
@rrhoover Especially in academia. I have spent almost an hour writing a specific and short thesis and my lecturer was like: "Not enough words..." O.o
Nick Abouzeid
Ramp
Hunter
I'm a notoriously wordy writer - saw this a few days ago on Safia's twitter and had to share it with the rest of PH! I'm a big fan of Polymail, so I'm not sure how I'll integrate this into my day-to-day life, but it's a great tool nonetheless. Thanks Safia! 📬 💌 📮
Safia Abdalla
Brief
Maker
@nickabouzeid Thanks for sharing this, Nick! Yeah, I'm not sure that Polymail has an extensions API for this to be added. I used Nylas and that has extensions so that might be where I take this next.
Nick Abouzeid
Ramp
Hunter
@captainsafia Excited to try out Nylas if you can get it working! 😊
Kunal Bhatia
The simple changing of the send button is quite powerful! Would love if it could highlight sentences that are the main culprits of wordiness. I currently use a combination of Hemingway and Boomerang to evaluate my writing. Bringing everything under one roof would be awesome.
Safia Abdalla
Brief
Maker
@kunalslab I haven't heard of Hemingway before but I've thought of including some of the features it has in future versions of Brief (specifically, the grade level indicator). I'll have to see which features are easier to integrate without crowding up the experience of Brief.
Kunal Bhatia
@captainsafia it is a delicate balance. Good luck! Happy to provide feedback when you come up with something new.
Raitis
@captainsafia Hemingway is a mighty fine thing, I use it all the time when writing copy or important emails. Will check out Brief as well!
Safia Abdalla
Brief
Maker
Hey everyone! I just published brief to the Chrome webstore and added the ability to force send an email via triple click. If you've already installed it from the .crx, remove that and install the web store version instead! https://chrome.google.com/websto...
Darren Moore
7 Questions
Great work 👏 Would love to see a 'max words per paragraph' count too. Nothing worse than a block of text in an email either!
Julie Chabin
Product Hunt
Everyone should use this.
Jason Cutler
Oh hurray, another Chrome-only product. Welcome to 1996 (refer to Internet Explorer)
Safia Abdalla
Brief
Maker
@jasonology What browser/email service are you using Jason? I've considered making a Nylas extension and perhaps a Firefox extension.
Paul Arterburn
Dabble me
@captainsafia great little project that scratched your own itch. Chrome is by far the best browser to build for given that it's 50%+ of the market (http://gs.statcounter.com/); unless it's purely because it piques your interest. Building something like this across browsers is just a distraction.
Safia Abdalla
Brief
Maker
@parterburn Chrome's got the biggest market share for sure (and also the best developer experience around extensions). Once I've got a nice feature set on Brief for Chrome, I'd like to bring it to Nylas, which is the desktop email client that I used. Scratching my own itch mostly! :P
Jason Cutler
@captainsafia I use iCloud, gmail, yahoo and office365 and use Safari, Firefox, Opera and iCab
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