Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization 173
Z80xxc! writes: The Gmail team announced "Inbox" this morning, a new way to manage email. Inbox is email, but organized differently. Messages are grouped into "bundles" of similar types. "Highlights" pull out and display key information from messages, and messages can be "snoozed" to come back later as a reminder. Inbox is invite-only right now, and you can email inbox@google.com to request an invite.
More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be just as happy if they'd leave gmail alone. It was fine years ago without all the ****. That said, I might be a crusty old fart and in need of shaking up.
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, considering how badly they fucked up Google Maps, I think you're right to be cautious.
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh Gods, yes. The new maps is an abomination. It drives me insane. It's so SLOOOOW, that huge top-left info box which obscures way too much and keeps flapping up and down, the inability to show transport links AND your searched for items... how the hell are people using it? it's a symptom, though, of Google having become detached from its end-users.
I use the old maps - there's a URL for them still;
https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic
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I particularly dislike the fact that, not only have you left the roundabout, but have entered the next one, before it notices. It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).
And that on a Note 3, but it used to work well on an HTC Desire Bravo!
Come of Google - you need to test software before you release it - you are not Microsoft
Sigh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions
Since this is slashdot, I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software. But I will say this: If software running on 1960's technology could get humans to the moon and back, it is not unreasonable for me to expect my phone to tell me how to get to ikea.
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Re:Sigh! (Score:4, Insightful)
You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.
Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"
Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"
Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."
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Catch up gramps.
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Yeah, but it seems like the point was "Does Google have good ideas anymore?" not "Can I stick with my status quo come hell or highwater?"
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Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.
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I was going to agree that email was fine twenty years ago, but I do kind of like the way modern webmail displays threads even if it screws with the paradigm a bit. God, could they possibly have picked worse terminology for this new stuff though. I'll probably avoid it as long as I can.
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, I don't understand. Did you mean you'll snooze it ?
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's kind of what pisses me off about modern "innovation", it's reimplementing something that already existed, much of the time, and trying to call it novel or new. There are very few legitimate new technologies these days.
Even when they're going on about VPC and being able to spawn apps, that's just X Consortium all over again. From 1984.
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't threading, it was displaying a thread as one scrollable page that was the innovation. I'd not seen a newsreader or mail client that did that before. Combined with collapsing of quoted text (which was an old idea, I think it was in Eudora or Xnews or something, at least), it's an easier way to read through a thread, removing one level of navigation (paging through messages merged with scrolling down a single message).
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. UI innovations are still innovative, even if the underlying technology has been around for a while.
2. There are no existing email clients that bundle semantically similar emails and extract relevant highlights. Even if you're not impressed with the ui there is still a lot of interesting machine learning behind this.
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1. Some of us define innovation as novel improvements. Implementing something that already exists isn't innovative. Coming up with the initial idea was the innovative part. Incremental improvements aren't innovation, no matter what marketing says.
2. Incorrect.
2a) Bundling: Custom rule based or sorting by specific things (both of which are supported by every modern email client). Also spam flagging. 2b) Extracting: Outlook extracts dates and times and recommends creating calendar events. Thunderbird
Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see any reason to eschew experimentation simply for the sake of familiarity. The old inbox will always be around; if not at Google, then at a competitor. You lose nothing. And for every hundred failed ideas, there's one gem that changes how we think about something forever.
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It's like my grandpa always used to say "Kid, if it ain't broke, don't fix it--and also don't ever trust Japs or Krauts."
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I'd be just as happy if they'd leave gmail alone. It was fine years ago without all the ****.
You could also just set up your Gmail in a normal email client and then not be effected by the whims of the UI designers/marketing department. It will stay the same on your side.
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The main tragedy, if I ever have to come off Gmail, is exactly how much grouping (in the form of hundreds of labels, many nested). It's how I classify and find my way around gigs and gigs of email.
I can recover my email itself from Gmail via POP. WTF can I recover or port the whole classification and grouping - the labels!
If there was a way to get that out in a way that would import to something else, I'd darn well consider it.
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You do realize that "high IQ individuals that have fuck all common sense" used to be Slashdot's key demographic, don't you?
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It begins again (Score:4, Funny)
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a/s/l?
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Automated digesting (Score:2)
Re:Automated digesting (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, I'd like to see better methods of processing/digesting email, but not for personal email.
My work email is flooded with all kinds of junk, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to improve that. I get a bunch of ads that I wouldn't necessarily call "spam", but their ads. I actually want to get some of them (they're sometimes relevant to my job), but it's always super-low priority. I also get copied on a bunch of stuff that I might want to look at, often don't really need to, but that I do want to k
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It was figured out a long time ago, get modern and use RSS instead of email for notifications.
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When there's cooperation, the settings that deliver best mutual benefit should be worked out by direct interaction, for the sake of effectiveness. That would put email back into its role of transport mechanism, where it belongs.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but email transport is still in its role of transport mechanism, whereas email clients are still in their role of sorting and arranging emails for display by a user in a configurable way. I'm not sure what there is to be changed there. Do you feel like explaining your comment?
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For example, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online" could be enhanced to something like, say, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online. Further on/off messages are suspended for 8 hours unless you click ."
I think I mentioned elsewhere, a part of the problem with the sort of notifications I'm talking about is that I'm receiving them from many different vendors/services/devices who each choose their own standards, forms, and methodologies. It's the nature of things that I don't necessarily have any control over what I receive, how I receive it, when I receive it, or what form it comes in as. If I could even control what came in the subject line, then I wouldn't consider it such a problem.
For example, it's n
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I don't see how a mail client can discriminate between an email from my aunt and a message resulting from, say, an error in a cron job execution
Well then you're not the person to figure the problem out. It should actually be fairly easy to discriminate between an email from your aunt and a cron job error. Leave that problem to someone who does see how it can be done.
The point is that there is something wrong in how advertising is conceived and carried out.
I see. So let's just round up all people everywhere and control how they send email, since that'll be easy. Why even apply existing techniques for analyzing text to improve existing email filtering/sorting tools in email clients, when it's so much easier to control human behavior?
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Gmail had a similar thing (though as with many features, Hotmail had it first), I think they called theirs "Priority Inbox", which covered both the actual priority inbox as well as all the other social/travel/etc. filtered inbox views. Like you, I immediately switched it off. The only one I can tolerate is Hotmail's "Active View". It's useful enough to warrant existing and innocuous enough to not warrant me trying to turn it off.
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Perhaps... (Score:1)
No Fuckign Thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
It combines the worst of mobile, email, and social. ...yet.
At least they're not injecting it into Gmail like all their previous attempts...
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Agreed. After I don't know how long I've been using email, both GUI and CLI clients, I've found the only feasible way to do it without clutter is to use mutt. When something stupid comes in that can only be read with a HTML client as it has no text/plain part I can funnel it through lynx. I've not found any web client to help at all helpful when it comes to processing a mail inbox. Sorry, call me grumpy but snooze feature is no different to me setting a flag. I'll be surprised if anything beats mutt this de
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Use alpine, and you can (usually) read the rich/html part still in your terminal program. You can have it default to the plain text part, but use A on an individual message to view the rich part if necessary.. No need to pipe it through lynx. Plus, alpine does Unicode too, which can sometimes be useful (at least it's not showing up as gibberish..)
(Pine/alpine long ago was able to view the plain-text-ified rich parts, but I made the suggestion long ago for the A toggle, and it was added.)
Bundles are great... (Score:1)
I like my current bundles... new messages are bundled at the top, just above the older messages.
can I snooze on this feature ... (Score:1)
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You have slashdotted an inbox (Score:5, Funny)
550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that
550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more
550-5.2.1 information, please visit
550 5.2.1 http://support.google.com/mail... [google.com] dy7si138331wib.0 - gsmtp
And at google's scale - impressive
Google Beta products (Score:1)
I thought they removed "Beta" from Gmail already.
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Hmmm ... (Score:4, Informative)
So this is the Google Wave thing that nobody knew WTF it was for, but which everyone kept saying was super awesome and the way of the future ... but for email?
I'm afraid I'm not really overly interested.
I guess it's cool that someone is still trying to design new things and think about things differently. But from reading TFA, this sounds like something which I'm not sure why I'd want it.
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Yup. It's an amalgam of all the aborted attempts Google has made at jamming social shit into email (including their own) and making the interface extra shitty and extra "mobile".
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I used google wave as it was intended. In fact, seeing it work as intended was one of the coolest things ever, and that's why they kept a lot of its features and incorporated them into google docs. We used wave to plan a camping trip with about 20 people. 20 people all working at the same time on a single document, adding things to "buy" lists, getting contact information, editing errors, putting confirmation numbers, adding/removing what each person was able to bring or was responsible for, etc. It was incredibly collaborative and brilliantly simple to use. Sadly I don't think most folks used it like that, or got to experience it. As it stands now, google docs almost completely implements what was there, so at least that functionality still works.
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It was what it was: a proof of concept; spaghetti thrown at the wall to see if it sticks. The ideas in Google Wave have been incorporated into a bunch of stuff all over the net, from G+ to Facebook and elsewhere.
Mail inbox@google.com to opt in (Score:3, Funny)
Can I mail outbox@google.com to opt out?
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Can I mail outbox@google.com to opt out?
If history is any guide, no. At least, not for long.
Still try to do proprietary email? (Score:3)
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There isn't a good reason why social networking couldn't function more like email, with multiple providers inter-operating over some standard protocol. There just isn't as much money in it for the big players to be interested.
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Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though?
Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it; .mint and .ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but mos
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Most of my work mailing lists would work FAR better as Usenet groups.
Don't they Already Have This (Score:2)
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I'm not sure who this is helping (Score:2)
Email users tend to fall into two distinct categories of usage; heavy and "guess I have to use email", and you can trace the distinction almost straight along generation gaps. From my experience, most of the heavy users of email tend to customize systems to what works best for them -- in my work at University IT, the heaviest users usually have very nuanced inboxes with dozed of folders and filters they constructed to suit their needs, disabling any and all auto-sorting for fear of missing an email. Our big
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It's helping Google. Because people that manage their own folders and filters end up shit-canning all the sponsored e-mail that Google wants you to see.
I read that as (Score:3)
We know better than you how to organize your mail.
They can keep it.
How does that work? (Score:2)
I'm sending an email right now to cutegirlfriend@google.com
Why do I still read these comments (Score:5, Insightful)
The level of naysayers, resistance to change in Slashdot is the most I have seen in forever and I have been reading Slashdot for quite a while now.
Could you please, please, try it before saying that it is just like [insert failed google product here] or [insert very successful google product that you don't like here].
I know this is quite a culture shift for Slashdot, but sometimes it's too much.
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Bundles? I already successfully, with minimal effort, manage personal, business and sales-related emails. I don't need an algorithm to do that less well than I already do.
Highlights? Ok, maybe. I have a decent working memory, but maybe finding and scrolling down to the email from Delta and then tapping it open is too much for some people. Not me.
If the Assists bot is as "good" as google map
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The level of naysayers, resistance to change in Slashdot is the most I have seen in forever and I have been reading Slashdot for quite a while now.
Bundles: stay organized automatically
It's like Folders! With keyword filtering!
But we do it automatically for you!
Highlights: the important info at a glance
They're like Subject lines! But with more information!
Reminders, Assists, and Snooze: your to-doâ(TM)s on your own terms
Calendar and Alarm integration! In your e-mail!
Because we were already reading your e-mail, we used some Google Search magic to pre-fetch information you might want. Gmailâ(TM)s still there for you, but Inbox is something new. Itâ(TM)s a better way to get back to what matters, and we can
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Why? Given Google's track record at UI and UX (generally pretty poor), their track record of 'fixing' what isn't broken (pretty good, I.E. they do it more often than not), their track record of benign neglect of their products (pretty good in the same sense
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Have you SEEN the fucking changes google have made? Holy your damned horses sonny.
Google Maps is now a complete and utter abortion, it's slower and lacking some seriously fantastic features of the old one.
The google introduction of the "priority inbox" auto filtering my email was great. THEN the dipshits decided to split my email into 4 tabs? Why? Who the hell wants that. I now have to run in 'legacy' mode to disable the 4 tabbed inboxes. I had no issues with the priority inbox which was,.. change!
We're
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I tried it back when it was called Mailbox [mailboxapp.com]. I stopped using it because it didn't work with anything other than Gmail, and I was migrating away from Gmail to FastMail (they've since added support for Yahoo!, but still no general IMAP support, which is what I'm eagerly waiting for).
Granted, I won't be using this feature either, since, as I just said, I migrated away from Gmail, but the fact is, I've already seen it implemented better elsewhere. The one shown in the videos wasn't nearly as understandable or pl
Here's A Novel Suggestion For Mail (Score:2)
Just stop (Score:2)
Every time Google messes with Gmail, the interface gets worse. The Gmail product management needs to be flogged every time they try to be too clever. By now they're owed at least a dozen floggings.
Please give us the option (Score:2)
We must have the option of turning this stuff off. Google already does a fantastic job of keeping spam out of my inbox, and I unsubscribe from bulk emails I don't want. The result is that I get only a couple emails per day. I don't need fancy features to organize them as I just use search to find what I want. I'm sure this will help people with email clutter problems but I just like it the way it currently is. So please let me turn it off, just like Gmail's last attempt at automatic sorting.
April Fools? (Score:2)
This sounds like an April Fools joke. What's the date... October 22nd... Hmm... They've mixed up their calendar.
Requested Invite but my email is a mess! (Score:3)
oh fuck no ! ! ! (Score:5, Informative)
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That's good info, but they do push their annoying-as-fuck unneeded "improvements" by default. I'm tired of it - I've migrated my important email to Outlook.com now, and I'm sorting out my personal email now (harder to change as I search history more there than the financial stuff).
I've said it before on /., but I'll repeat it: Outlook.com doesn't suck. Gmail was the only sane answer 12 years ago, but my how times have changed.
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For plain-text email, once it passed through their machine you have lost your privacy. You gain no privacy or right-mindedness by not letting mail "stay" on their servers.
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not at all. the content of course is disclosed, that's just ok or else it would be encrypted.
however your use of the content is private matter too. that's as safe as it could be on local storage if using a respectful client. of course this includes also your full contact list, your habits, location and probably system and device information, if not more. this is inevitably leaked with any imaginable online client, and if you also choose gmail that's an explicit statement that privacy means shit to you. note
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You are right, that you retain the privacy of data beyond the message itself, I didn't think of that. When I think of Gmail, I think of Gmail the way I use it: as a server. I almost never use the web-interface because I dislike it (on top of the fact that I can't read my email in the web interface anyhow due to the encryption). I use a client almost exclusively.
I'm not in their demographic for their new product/service and hadn't really thought through other use-cases. That said, many (most) of my correspon
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That law only applies in the United States. Email is a bit more global.
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The NSA disagrees: all email ever sent is stored now, in their datacenters, next to the recordings of every voice call for the past decade. Your tax dollars at work..
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Almost every ISP you can sign up for in the USA, including all the big players like Comcast, provide email with your internet service.
You might not even need another provider, and certainly not google or microsoft.
Picking a different mail provider doesn't solve the NSA problem. End to end encryption solves the NSA problem, and you can use that regardless of who provides your email.
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Unless you encrypt all your mail, and your correspondents do so as well, email is basically a post card. It matters not who your provider is, really. If you want to secure your own mail server, you'll need to run your own. It's far easier though, to get an S/MIME certificate and use that for sensitive emails with key correspondents and leave the spam and junk mail as is (plain text and readable). It's just a matter of benefit for effort.
My mindset is basically email is a post card, if I want to have privacy
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Sort of. Gmail sort of kind of barely works with IMAP.
I admit I can't personally list the things that it doesn't do, but I know there has been discussion on the alpine mailing list many times in the past about how Gmail improperly (and purposely, from their end) follows the IMAP protocol.
Re:As if we needed (Score:4, Funny)
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great way to self spam you!
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sudo yum install alpine
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Why do you "miss" anything?
Alpine's running in the Terminal window next to this one (along with Mail). I use it all the time.