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."
Today I'm proud to announce (Score:5, Funny)
Priority Post (beta)
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Your priority post even comes pre-expanded for our viewing convenience.
How about good subject lines? (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply"
How about putting "For action", "For reply", or "For your information" in the subject lines of e-mails?
It would also be a good thing to put a 1-line summary of the email, followed up with a Details section.
Of course, this only works from the perspective of the sender, but if you do this when sending e-mails out to people, they might pick up on it.
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Reminder that anyone who wants to go to the company picnic can call XXX-XXXX
Please conserve paper
Hi, I saw this funny video of a cat running into a wall
Did you know that sometimes doctors are wrong and people can live longer then their doctor tells them they can?
Most of the junk e-mail is sent by:
A) Mass-emailers
B) Clueless computer user
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...And the remaining proportion seems to be sent by the sort of people who think that sending every email as Highest priority will make people pay more attention to them, as opposed to write them off as jumped-up blowhards with no sense of perspective.
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And yes a coworker did just send me that today.
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would also be a good thing to put a 1-line summary of the email, followed up with a Details section.
Isn't that what the subject line and message body are supposed to be for?
I appreciate that Google is trying to idiot-proof email but it'd probably be a simpler task to train people using almost your exact phrasing: the subject line is a one line summary of the email and the body is the details section.
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.
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Someone mod this +6 865 877 562 (the approximate world population).
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:5, Insightful)
I appreciate that Google is trying to idiot-proof email but it'd probably be a simpler task to train people...
Are you serious? I'd take a complex sort algorithm over trusting the people who email me in a heartbeat! I've been begging a client of mine to stop marking his emails urgent for half a decade. Give it up man! Flagging your emails and using a lot of exclamation marks does not make you important!
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I use lots of filters:
* 95% of opt-in advertising mail goes into the "Boring ads" folder, and is never read. If I'm booking a flight I'll look at some recent emails from the airlines I've used before, in case they've sent me a discount code. The other 5% goes in the "Ads" folder -- stuff I usually read, like emails from my favourite nightclub saying what's on this weekend.
* Anything from my parents goes into a folder, they email me far too much.
* Newsletters (from charities, alumni groups, etc) go in a fold
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75+ labels on my work email and about 3 dozen filters
Frankly, I'm going to be pissed if I did all that work for nothing
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The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short. A LOT of people read email on tiny screens these days so long subjects just make life difficult. Really short subjects don't give enough information about what the email is truly about, so people will arbitrarily read or not-read it based on incomplete information -- which is neither good for the sender nor the receiver.
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Because it would work about as well as the high importance flag in outlook. From experience it seems clear the sender of emails isn't the right person to decide importance etc for the receiver. There is no advantage to sorting my email by someone else's estimate of importance.
I'm a little surprised that this kind of feature has been so long coming. If it works, it will be a big help to people who proces
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally, a mail client should track how often someone uses the 'high importance' flag. Someone where I used to work used it for every single mail that she sent to mailing lists, and they were never important. In contrast, my editor only uses it for stuff that I actually need to read and respond to urgently, maybe 1% of emails I get from him. A mail client could easily learn that the first person always abuses the flag, while the second person uses it appropriately, and only flag emails from him.
It could also easily learn which senders always get immediate replies, while others get replies after a few days. Presumably the Google system is using the same sort of learning algorithms that they use for spam, but with this kind of thing as input rather.
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Automatically generated email (Score:2)
To gmail it will look like you are ignoring these emails, especially when the subject line tells you what is wrong.
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We did already lose the TOFU war. There is no way people would ever do this since it means more work for them.
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of these people doesn't know how to use an address book or type in an email address unless absolutely necessary, so all emails she sends are responses to old emails. So if I want to find an email that she sent last week, it might be in a thread that started in 2006. Or 2008. She's not consistent about which ones she responds to.
The other one always puts "Hey Ben" in the subject. Doesn't matter what it's about; the subject is always, "Hey Ben". even when I change the subject line on response, he'll change it right back to "Hey Ben" when it's his turn.
I've tried to explain the benefits of good subjects to both of them, but they give me that 10,000 mile stare like I'm speaking Klingon or something.
Re:How about good subject lines? (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds like a candidate for a suitable (fake) "bounce" message. Maybe something like this...
"Attention Will Robinson! Your email has been intercepted by a lameness filter. Please try supplying an apposite subject line."
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I don't see the problem with that.
Like top-posting.
Yo Dawg (Score:5, Funny)
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Pimp my Inbox?
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...
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arms race (Score:5, Insightful)
So now only emails meeting a certain priority will make it to the top of the list. How long until people figure out how to make their emails have higher priority and start abusing that power, leading the same problem Google just solved? Better to rely on a combination of filters to sort your mail for you as it comes in than try to trust some automated system (that can be gamed by others) to do it for you.
Re:arms race (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait, a -1 Troll and not a +1 Funny for this obvious sarcasm and reference to net neutrality? Let this be a lesson for safe forum activity: always wear your /sarcasm tag.
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And let this be a lesson for metamoderating-by-reply: ratings change. :)
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Re:arms race (Score:5, Insightful)
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So you game it by asking lots of questions. :)
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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.
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It's supposed to learn from your email-reading habits, so it's something like Thunderbird's Bayesian spamfilter, i.e. gaming this would be difficult.
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How is it an arms race? They didn't make it so that these criteria are what makes email important to everybody. It learns whats important to each user, individually. Thats a much harder target.
If you read LKML messages every time, they'll start getting marked important. If i just look now and then, it won't be so marked in my inbox. You can help it learn by flagging a message important, or one that was incorrectly flagged important you can tag as unimportant. You can set up filters.
Unlike a search engine, w
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It's actually made quite a difference to my inbox so far. I can now readily distinguish between my "read
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That's just silly, who would try to game it? My friends and family who email me certainly won't. Anyone who would try to game this to get your attention would be sending junk mail which is already taken care of quite well by Google's spam filters.
That said I'll give this a try, but I don't think it will be of much use to me. The mail filters I've already set up to prioritize mail work quite well.
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Actually, chain letters have existed long before spam filters - I think the rise of the bayesian filters killed the last off because I remember getting maybe
Spam detection is much easier (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you? Filtering important emails sounds much more difficult than filtering the usual spam: One one hand, spam usually comes in bulk; it is distributed to millions of addresses (which provides a way of detecting it) with little variety in regards to content. On the other hand, spam messages do have much more in common (because there are few authors with a handful of different content types) than "important mail", which is created by many different people with a huge variety in regards to content.
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I haven't had any spam get through their filters, but I have a 3 tiered email system. Gmails for per
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The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you?
As it turns out, yes. I was using this a decade ago [gnus.org] in Gnus.
I started unsubscribing from mailing lists... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot of crap that I used to think was important, or thought I'd be interested in... But the messages just piled up.
One day i just started deleting. I think I removed 7,000 'conversations' from my gmail inbox in an hour. Now I'm much better about deleting crap emails (without opening them) instead of letting them languish...
This 'priority inbox' will be interesting... Glad they're thinking about the problem - too bad it won't unsubscribe you from lists automatically. :)
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Should I ask why you didn't just create filters to have traffic from those lists automatically tagged appropriately and removed from your inbox?
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I did have a few such filters... But for the most part I never read the messages. What's the point of receiving an email if I'm never going to look at it? That's the kind of information I use a search engine for.
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You would also waste less time if you stop reading/posting on slashdot, though... so not sure how much it applies =P.
Good work. Keep trying. (Score:2)
Someday, in the far future, Gmail may be almost as good as Gnus.
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Someday, in the far future, Gmail may be almost as good as Gnus.
Old saying: all operating systems are destined to reinvent unix, poorly.
New saying: all applications are destined to reinvent emacs, poorly.
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.
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By using filters and layers you can manually create rules to categorize email.
Priority inbox doesn't require you to manually create rules, instead it infers the likely priority of mail based on your reading and replying habits.
They both have their uses.
Multiple Inbox (Score:2)
That's my favorite lab item. I have like 5 - mailing lists, purchases I am waiting for in the mail, TODO, etc... I wonder if it is compatible?
The nigerian prince (Score:2, Funny)
Don't they already have a tool for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exactly. Filters + Skip the Inbox (archive it).
Re:Don't they already have a tool for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, filters are for categorizing mail by the criteria you have thought through and told Gmail about.
Priority Inbox is an option that, when you use it, tells Google you want it to do best-guess prioritization automatically, without you telling it any more than "do your thing".
Priority Inbox will probably be most useful for people who don't want the bother of defining filters, though people who do have explicit filtering rules that are used to categorize mail may also find it useful for prioritizing the stuff that's left in the inbox.
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Email is overused (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to get over hundred emails a week; newsletters, stuff from mailing lists and lots of emails of almost no importance to me. I unsubscribed from everything, after all we have this thing called RSS so there's no need to get the same information sent to the inbox.
I also watched a Google TechTalk called Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann [youtube.com] and have at most 5 emails in my inbox any day.
We've got RSS for news, newsletters, IM for short messages like "What's for lunch today?", I feel like mailing lists drown my inbox so I don't let them email me at all, so there are a lot of ways to limit the emails you get each day.
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Easier said than done. I get a daily feed of slashdot into my gmail account. I don't need it since I prefer going directly to the website. But, I can't unsubscribe, even when I follow the simple directions.
Mark it as spam. Do that a handful of times and you'll never see it again.
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Why not just set up a filter to send it straight into the Trash folder?
Forced Enable (Score:2)
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Threading (Score:3, Interesting)
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Finding items around by date (especially when you only know the approximate date)
That's easy, in the search box type: "from:abc@example.com after:YYYY/MM/DD before:YYYY/MM/DD" (quotes not included) you can also use it with a whole bunch of other search options: http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et_find_mail.htm [about.com] - you certainly shouldn't 'lose' an email from gmail's archive if you know anything at all about it - Google is good at search.
Reply-Request (Score:2)
I'd like to see GMail support a Reply-Request header that can be set by the sender and displayed to the recipient. That way when I send a question to someone I can sort my outstanding messages not yet replied to, and send a followup. An automatic timeout that prompts me with a composed followup request would be good. Recipients could see which requests are outstanding in their inbox. When my actual request is satisfied I could mark the thread as completed. The message IDs of the messages could link them all
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You could solve that in Thunderbird with a tag applied after sending and a custom view or search folder. No need to involve Google at all.
I went back to a regular IMAP client (Score:2)
I just went back to using Mac Mail and my iPhone checking all my accounts via IMAP. Everything keeps synced up. Very rarely do I log into Gmail from the web anymore.
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Honestly, I think an E-mail client with this type of functionality, an address book which works as well as Outlook's and the ability to handle POP & IMAP the same way would be the cat's ass.
Of course, I think Thunderbird 2 was the best E-mail client I ever had, so YMMV
An elegant solution to a non-problem (Score:2)
I like what they've done here. They basically took their spam filter and inverted it, creating the anti-spam, aka 'priority inbox'. It is genuinely clever.
It is also an absolute non-problem. The basic issue here is a human one, and is easily corrected.
Lesson #1: Your inbox is not an oracle into the past. You do not need everyone to carbon copy you in on everything they ever send 'just in case'. This is absurd and sets you up for failure by accepting mail you never actually intend to read. Instead rev
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Sooo....
Your solution is to make everyone use the application the way you want them to?
I guess that the same solution should be used for malware.
However, back in the real world, what if people don't want to do things your way?
I would guess that Google's solution could be right for those people.
Regards
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If people are spamming me, then I suppose I'll block their email addresses.
It isn't as if there isn't any consent here.
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I suspect that Google has a lot better handle on their users needs than you do in this area. Your proposed alternative is to get all senders in the world to change their behavior to fit the receiver's preferences. Google's new optional tool allows receivers using GMail a way of getting a reasonable first-cut view of message priority that is based on the receivers treatment of past messages without senders changing behavior. Google's tool, it seems, is more likely to work
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I'll suppose you failed to consider the final paragraph, but even if you merely disagree with the notion that this technology makes the problem worse, consider this:
Allowing someone to email you is a choice.
Re: 'genuinely clever'? Not really: (Score:2)
PopFile.
Been there, done that... and without the privacy concerns this will engender.
Very useful (Score:4, Insightful)
False dichotomy (Score:2)
I'm not so sure about the false dichotomy again here. Things aren't black and white, there are shades of grey, so mail should be sorted according to a rating, rather than a seperate folder.
PopFile? (Score:2)
Ah, so PopFile's generalized classification system lives again, reanimated in another body?
This could be marginally useful (Score:4, Interesting)
But what would be really useful is a snooze button for emails that would archive them for a few days (or whatever time you specify for that email) and then have it pop up in your inbox as if new after that.
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Just glad to see /. is back up. I was having serious geek withdrawal there for a while.
You mean you don't have a local mirror?
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Funny)
Only the one in my bathroom.
Ah, you're a TiSP [google.com] subscriber too eh? ;)
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It would start to load, you'd get some content and then *bam* "Connection reset'.
For me I got the first article (the Blackbox one), a banner and/or menu or two, and the odd image. No CSS.
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As Eric Schmidt recently said [bbc.co.uk]: "At the moment we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." And according to the article (and simple common sense), "Google would likely store more pe
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Um... I think this is for people who may NOT be quite as tech-savvy as you...
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You mean there's people who are so un-savvy that they're still using folders, rather than custom views or saved searches?
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Latest move to prod is sort of stopped -- I thought it was a dev VM, but powered off the wrong box from the command line.
Sorry about that.
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For you.
For the way you do things.
Perhaps Google has found that many people don't do things the way you do, and are trying to provide them with a good user experience that facilitates the way they work instead of trying to get them to work the way you would like them to?
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Wrong, on all three counts.
Their theories are more like #1:
1. Lots of people (not everyone) have too many emails in their inbox to tell the important ones at a glance,
2. Manually creating and updating rules, while useful for lots of categorization applications, is a clumsy and time consuming way of getting a good first-cut of what is likely to be important for many users. (not "Rules are too complicated to use.")
3. Priority inbox will be useful for many users because it creates prioritization rules that are
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You didn't quite get it straight. You do have control of the rules. You can increase or decrease the priority of individual emails, and more importantly you can turn it off if you don't like it.
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Go get PopFile and do the same thing completely local in private, then. Tinfoil hat not included, you'll have to fold your own.
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You're paranoid. Let's not be naive and think Google needed to add this feature in order to know which emails you pay attention to.
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don't get all self righteous, gmail has had filters forever.
the priority inbox is like the opposite of spam filtering. that is to say, it works AUTOMATICALLY. some people can't be assed to set up rules and filters and such, but this will do all the work for them.
so yes, it IS pretty amazing new technology. smartass.