I have never heard of ActivePieces. I took 30 min now to review it and play with it.
From that alone, I can say:
- you can definitely achieve what gossip does using ActivePieces (in other words, Gossip covers a small subset of what ActivityPieces does if you want to create your email manually and plug it into what they call an IMAP Piece)
- Yep, Gossip is much lighter and reacts instantly thanks to golang concurrency constructs (it’s now running on a tiny VPS there are few jobs and it’s consuming 22MB of RAM, I will be able to keep it free and scale really really high without much struggle)
- Gossip is geared more towards tech people (if you can put together a curl query to cover your needs than you can do almost anything you want - trigger a telegram msg, matrix chat, create a Jira ticket, …)
- Gossip doesn’t handle any complex automations now, it simply connects an email it generates into a webhook you input (that seems to cover all the use cases I needed in my workplace)
All questions are welcome! By saying it’s intended to tech people earlier I meant if you know what are the different components of an HTTP query, then you know enough to use it.
That’s not what I wanted to express. Not requesting your email credentials is an intended design decision (it’s more challenging also). Because personally, if I was a user, I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving my email credentials to a random website online. The alternative solution is to generate an email controlled by the website like I did.
So yeah, the intended use case isn’t to monitor your email address. But rather give you an email address that you can plug in an alerting system for example that would result in a webhook call (that would notify you on matrix or telegram, create a github issue, create Jira ticket,…).
Self hosting isn’t necessary if you don’t want to, you can already add your matrix webhook and generate a random email address you can use. You can configure your current gmail account for example to forward certain or all emails to that randomly generated address and that would trigger a webhook (matrix msg in our example). It involves an extra step (configuring gmail) at the benefit of not having to share your personal creds with a random website online (gossip).
I can provide an example on how to do that if you want to test that.
I do agree with you though on the second part, I will be adding some ready-to-use blocks for the most common services. That’s already a planned feature.
For now, it matches on the
From Address
only (to avoid spamming the API), but it will be very easy to add another field to match on the content or subject of the email if you think it’s a worthy feature.