Do I need to have an idea already?

No! The organizers can optionally share problems ready for you to help solve, such as:

- How to curate extremely large email archives (e.g. 1 million messages): including how to separate spam, mail advertising, everyday transactions, and social media receipts or notifications; or how to identify and categorize email that is family-related, work-related, etc.

- How to best provide or develop HTML5 image browsing for all attached images in an email archive; There is no native image browsing in email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, etc. It will be wonderful if people could browse all images attached to email messages in one place.

- How to best provide or develop attachment preview for an email archive without using cloud services for privacy reasons.

- How to best provide software-based redaction of sensitive information in email messages.

- How to organize email message contents by concepts (e.g. education, politics, arts, etc.).

The hackathon organizers (not the judges) would also be glad to consult with you to discuss other possible ideas that fall within the theme of the hackaton, and that align with your interests or expertise.

DevPost support sharing of ideas, discussion, and forming of teams. There will also be an opportunity to share ideas and form teams at the start of the hackathon.