GMail Introduces Priority Inbox 242
jason-za writes with this quote from a Google announcement:
"People tell us all that time that they're getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean — here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day — mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that's often not important. It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we're happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta) — an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail."
jason-za wrote that? Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Based on his website he doesn't sound like a Gmail engineer but more of a "MSc student in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town where [he does] research how to scale fuzzy crowds on the GPU with CUDA."
I feel like it's possible that Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer for Google, wrote that, or someone who represents Doug Aberdeen. It's more likely jason-za just copied and pasted that.
I really hate writing such snide remarks but come on slashdot editors, how long would it have taken to correctly attribute this stuff...
Intriguing, but... (Score:4, Informative)
This is intriguing, but it just seems to add yet another layer. Is it really needed? By leveraging Filters and Labels, you can automatically categorize email to whatever you want.
I also use the "Multiple Inboxes" Labs add-on that gives me a second "inbox" that is defined to display only "starred" items. no matter where the message is (in the inbox of archived with a label) I can always see those which I classify as "important." And by using Filters, this gets done automatically for many messages.
Re:arms race (Score:3, Informative)
It is also based on which ones you READ. So if you read all of those NO-REPLY emails you get then it will still consider them more important than other ones you do not read. If you are one of those people that read everything you get (or at least mark everything you receive as read) then you might be in trouble. And I'm sure this will remain an optional feature for quite some time.
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:5, Informative)
> ...it'd probably be a simpler task to train people...
No. Training people is a hopeless task.