I&#x27;m surprised spotlight, with the exception of Slack, doesn&#x27;t just do this fine enough. What was so frustrating?

We&#x27;ve started off focusing on search but will evolve over time to tackle other productivity drains and busywork in the modern office (think excessive meetings, form filling, timesheets, updates - basically everything we hated when we worked 9 to 5!). We plan to keep the search experience free and (hopefully) add enough value with these add-ons that people and companies consider paying us for themThanks for the tip on JMAP. I&#x27;m not familiar with the protocol but will look into it

What is your monetization plan if it’s currently free? Looks great, but bills need to be paid!Please consider eventually supporting Fastmail’s JMAP protocol (which they designed as a successor to IMAP).Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmap.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmap.io&#x2F;</a>

2000s, but yes, I miss having that. Though Raycast is a million years ahead of this product, and allows you to do a search that searches gmail on web etc, or if you email client supports apple script that can do there as well, and of course lots of chatgpt integrations and gemini for searching outlook, gmail etc.

In the 90&#x27;s there was &#x27;Google Desktop&#x27; which can do such things.Still miss it.

true. It&#x27;s too bad that greplin&#x27;s vision hasn&#x27;t made it into MacOS yet, though spotlight is better than it once was.

Reminds me of Greplin &#x2F; Cue, which Apple bought<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;cue-acquired-for-over-40m-likely-by-apple-to-compete-with-google-now&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;cue-acquired-for-over-40m-...</a>

Great catch, Thank you! We&#x27;ll fix that.

This is very, very unimportant - but the build in your demo video on the site has a typo in the application name, &quot;Selectirc&quot; instead of &quot;Selectric&quot; (seen in the menu bar)

I _really_ like this idea.Is the source code available somewhere?

Can you provide a demo output of AI capabilities by using Enron emails dataset and how AI answers those questions asked by lawyers in that case?

@vinnymac, Thanks for the feedback1) Additional devices (not to mention Windows support) is high on our todo list. We have some ideas on how do it in a privacy safe way. Our plan is to pick that up once we know the baseline search experience works well for people. 
2) Interface to onboard other platforms - great idea! Out of curiosity, what other platforms&#x2F;services would you personally want to see added?

Reminds me of a modern macOS version of “Everything” for windows. Love the concept!It would be interesting if there was an option to add additional devices, such as a MacBook or iPhone, and search across all of them at once.Alternatively if you want to preserve isolation perhaps a mobile app would suffice.If you built an interface that we could plug other platforms into, I could see that being helpful, akin to what raycast has done with their extensions.

You have no information about where you are, who you are, etc. I might have installed this 15 years ago, but I would never use an app where it has access to my emails when I know zero about the company.You start off saying &quot;I&quot; and then continually start saying &quot;we&quot;. This might be some weekend project where you haven&#x27;t gotten to any of that, but to trust something to read my emails, which contain so much personal information, is just a no-go.

Re: proof point, what you&#x27;re trying to show is that this won&#x27;t steal passwords or data or be sold to someone who will, so you have to put some reputations behind it. The best thing would be to put your team on the site -- right now there are zero people on the site with their names behind this. Put who they are, where they worked before, and have them refer to this project from their LinkedIn&#x2F;Github&#x2F;etc. so it&#x27;s a two-way link -- then there&#x27;s reputations at stake. Then if you can also get some people with larger reputations than yours to believe in you and put their reputations behind it the same way, via an advisory board etc, that&#x27;s even better.Your privacy policy and terms are not bad, in that they address your specific software and describe an opt out for collecting aggregated data. I&#x27;d proofread, since typos like &quot;Users also have the option of opting out of this collect when&quot; make it sound like you haven&#x27;t had lawyers look at your privacy approach. And &quot;We may collect information about how you use the Service, such as search queries&quot; sounds ominous, maybe qualify that up front.Finally, this is when people start asking what your plan is for monetizing, since &quot;sell the data&quot; is the default plan. Having a good answer to that on the site would be great.

I can vouch for the fact that we don&#x27;t have access to any of your data! From your perspective, what&#x27;s a good proof point you would like to see?

Can anyone vouch for the privacy and overall trustworthiness of the team? I really love this concept and want to install it immediately!

Thanks for bringing this up. We store the index encrypted on disk with a randomly generated key. The key is itself stored in the Keychain.

I wonder how these apps secure the “indexed” data on device. These on-device databases are probably ripe for exfiltration by malware to get all of your juicy details in a neat, formatted table&#x2F;database format.

Absolutely, we already support Onedrive and will look into adding Teams support next. Any other connectors which you&#x27;d find useful?

Good luck on the launch! Do you plan more connectors? Would love to see Teams, onedrive etc

If you have a minute, are you able to share a screenshot at adityaATwasudeo.com? I&#x27;d love to take a look at this.Edit: We also have a discord if that&#x27;s easier - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;RbYYU6mU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;RbYYU6mU</a>

I searched for the name of the company I&#x27;m talking with in my next meeting and it gave me a recipe for rice? Company name was unrelated to rice!

It is! It mimics the sound of the Selectric typewriter (itself a classic product design masterpiece IMO)

If I&#x27;m not mistaken, selectric is the name of an Emacs package that adds sound(s?) when you type from some IBM (?) Selectric typewriter.

This - and Raycast [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raycast.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raycast.com&#x2F;</a>

IMO this is your business model. Build an Alfred clone that is AI first. It has a potential to be a nice lifestyle business.Mac users still buy software and I’ve wanted to buy something like this for years.

I&#x27;d be okay with installing both and just having a callout to the program via alfred :). It&#x27;d be a useful way to trial. Totally understand if not worth it though, looking forward to seeing this grow!

I took a look at Alfred Workflows when we were first starting to build this a few months back but couldn&#x27;t figure out a way to implement the local crawling and indexing functionality esp. for online services. The alternative would have been indexing and storing data on the cloud but we wanted to prioritize privacy. We wouldn&#x27;t use a service which crawled our personal data and stored it in the cloud so it didn&#x27;t seem fair to ask anyone else to do so!

There is a nice plugin for Alfred in Ruby that searches Google Drive

Could this be a plugin for Alfred? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alfredapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alfredapp.com&#x2F;</a>

Thank you! We&#x27;re different in a couple of ways:
1) In addition to local files, we also support your cloud accounts - Gmail, Drive, Outlook, OneDrive, Slack, Dropbox (for now). IIRC Raycast file explorer currently crawls your local computer but please correct me if I&#x27;m misinformed
2) I touched upon this in another reply. All data we crawl and index is stored on your local computer alone. We also run our AI models locally so no data ever needs to leave.

Congrats on the launch! this looks interesting, but how is it different from raycast&#x27;s search &#x2F; alfred?

Turns out you have to jump a couple of hoops to create a Discord link which never expires. Should be fixed now, thanks for flagging!

Very weird. It was working a couple of hours back when I tested it. Second time this is happening to me with Discord. Here&#x27;s a fresh link and I&#x27;ll update the site (after troubleshooting this a bit more) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;R63PTQ6CFh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;R63PTQ6CFh</a>

FYI your Discord invite link in the bottom right corner is invalid!

Nothing needed on the Slack side. Login with your Slack credentials through the OAUTH flow, grant access to your workspace and it&#x27;ll start crawling. Drop me a mail on adityaATwasudeo.com or discord (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;RbYYU6mU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;RbYYU6mU</a>) in case you run into any problems.

How does the slack integration work? Do we need anything on the Slack side?

No. I mean the Mail app itself. It can be used like a lite version of Outlook.
The app can be used as a client for standard IMAP&#x2F;POP mail servers. It also has GMail integrations.The mail is usually downloaded into local mbox files.

I would be happy with incorporating Mac mail search into your tool. So you just proxy spotlight&#x2F;mail search capabilities.

Do you mean iCloud mail? We looked into it but Apple unfortunately does not support an API for it. Another potential option could be using IMAP but we haven&#x27;t looked at it just yet.

Any plans to add support for the macOS Mail app?

Should be fixed now - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;R63PTQ6CFh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;R63PTQ6CFh</a>

Immediately thought this was an odd name choice. Why bother with the namespace overlap? Pick something original.. Branding 101

Good callout! Paperwork is in progress

Interestingly, both IBM and Lexmark trademarks on Selectric™ are dead or expired, and other marks don&#x27;t conflict.You likely want to file to claim this.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trademarkia.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;trademarks?q=SELECTRIC&amp;country=us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trademarkia.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;trademarks?q=SELECTRIC&amp;co...</a>

I got frustrated with Outlook, Gmail and Google drive search never being able to find anything in my Inbox or Cloud storage and decided to build a personal email and document search that works better.Selectric is a free MacOS app and currently supports Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Dropbox and Slack. The app is completely private. We index and store all data on your Mac. We also run AI models locally so no data ever needs to leave your computer.I&#x27;d love for the HN community to try us out and share feedback!

Show HN: Selectric – macOS Search for Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Slack