THE THING WE BUILT:

PostGhost

Email is like that fringe friend who shows up uninvited to your house party with important news. Then disappears through the backyard bushes, never to be seen again. They mentioned something critical about a deadline, but good luck finding them in your crowded inbox of automated BD “quick question” emails, OpenTable promos, and LinkedIn notifications.

Can you tell we don't love email integration?

Sure, there are tools to wrangle the alphabet soup of IMAP, SMTP, SPF, DMARC, and the rest. But what if you just want a simple app that can read an email — without all the setup?

So we built a thing.

Say hello to the PostGhost API

How it works:

• Send emails to [email protected] with any label you want

• Include an optional [pass:secret] in the subject line if you want an extra layer of protection

• PostGhost processes and stores the content automatically

• Fetch your emails via simple REST API using labels, or id with passcode

Things we learned and lessons applied:

1. Email is still universal. Slack, Teams, and Notion want to own business communication, but email remains the lowest common denominator. Every system can send email. Every person has email. Every business process touches email somewhere. Building tools that work with email instead of replacing email feels like working with gravity instead of against it.

2. Plus-addressing is criminally underused. Still the all-time greatest Gmail feature: most people don’t know you can add +anything to your email address and it’ll still deliver. [email protected] and [email protected] both go to [email protected]. But now you have automatic categorization. It's like having infinite email addresses without managing infinite inboxes. So we ran with it.

3. Right-sized security. Sometimes security needs to be airtight. Other times, it just needs to match the size and job of the task at hand. We’re not storing sensitive data — the vision here is to share content that’s already public. So instead of overbuilding with keys or auth, we kept it simple: if someone has the content and the passcode from the subject line, they get access.

4. Maybe this solves the Reading Room scaling problem. We’ve been thinking about the next step for Reading Room. What if you want to share email content with a larger group — in a space they’re already in? PostGhost is a step in that direction. It lets us programmatically handle email content without the mess of traditional integrations. When the foundation is simple and reliable, you can build more interesting things on top of it.

Built with ❤️ by Township

You’re receiving this because you signed up for Township’s “We Built a Thing” newsletter. We'll only send these when we, well, build things.