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Google Communications

Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization 173

Posted by Soulskill from the will-be-in-beta-for-the-next-eight-years dept.
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.
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Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization More

Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization

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  • More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:03PM (#48205339)

    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)

      by blackjackshellac ( 849713 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:08PM (#48205399)

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:41PM (#48205707)

        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

        • We are using it because it is marginally better than a hole in the head.

          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

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sowelu ( 713889 )

      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)

        by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:20PM (#48205533)

        Sorry, I don't understand. Did you mean you'll snooze it ?

      • Re:More changes I don't want ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TWX ( 665546 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:36PM (#48205659)
        One could thread messages before webmail if one's mail client had support for it. Hell, Usenet and Fidonet clients could thread messages, as could public message boards. That technology dates back to the dawn of the personal computer, and may well have existed on big-iron machines before that.

        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)

          by safetyinnumbers ( 1770570 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:48PM (#48205777)

          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)

          by afgam28 ( 48611 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @04:05PM (#48206633)

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            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)

      by halivar ( 535827 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `reglefb'> on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:28PM (#48205599)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by NotDrWho ( 3543773 )

      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."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      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.

      • 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.

  • It begins again (Score:4, Funny)

    by blueshift_1 ( 3692407 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:04PM (#48205349)
    ... now we get to see comments everywhere flooded with "Can I haz invite code, plz. user@genericdomain.com kthx"
  • Automated digesting of email could be a useful feature of AI.

    • Re:Automated digesting (Score:5, Funny)

      by scubamage ( 727538 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:33PM (#48205639)
      "Excuse me Dave, but the crown prince of Nigeria requires your assistance immediately. Also, there is a marked amount of concern about your penis size, you may wish to speak with a medical professional."

    • 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

      • It was figured out a long time ago, get modern and use RSS instead of email for notifications.

        • Still doesn't solve the vendor infotisements. No way they're going to rely on your subscription to an RSS when they can shoot you a direct email. Some of their communication wouldn't be useful without a very vast array of RSS servers on their end either (i.e. notifying you of a sales rep change, etc...). RSS is good, but I don't think it'd get all of the topics nine-times mentioned.
        • That would be nice if everything I received notifications for supported RSS.
  • I've seen a similar functionality already present on my old hotmail account. The Windows 8.1 mail interface (used to) sort some emails into metafolders like "social" so on. I immediately disabled it, as it interfered with my habitual way of viewing/scanning email - I was missing inbound messages because of it.

    If this is more of the same, I think I'll opt out if/when Google decides to roll it out to the whole wide world. I like GMail (beta) just the way it is. YMMV.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        I use that feature. It's nice that my phone doesn't chirp every time I get an email offer. I may be interested, so it's not necessarily spam, but it sorts into the "promotions" box and I can peruse (or ignore) at my convenience.
  • Google should fix things that are borken [google.com] before breaking new things.

  • No Fuckign Thanks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:07PM (#48205385)

    It combines the worst of mobile, email, and social.
    At least they're not injecting it into Gmail like all their previous attempts... ...yet.

    • 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

      • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I like my current bundles... new messages are bundled at the top, just above the older messages.

  • ... and never come back to it?

  • You have slashdotted an inbox (Score:5, Funny)

    by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:10PM (#48205417)
    The error that the other server returned was:
    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

  • I thought they removed "Beta" from Gmail already.

    • Does "Inbox" read "Gmail" to you? Last time I checked, there's no law saying no company shall make two programs that serve similar purposes in different ways.

  • Hmmm ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:13PM (#48205455) Homepage

    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.

    • 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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:30PM (#48205615)

      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.

      • Agreed - wave wasn't so much a bad idea as a good idea that was badly sold to people. Glad the functionality is still around because it is useful for realtime collaboration.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by halivar ( 535827 )

          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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:14PM (#48205473)

    Can I mail outbox@google.com to opt out?

  • Still try to do proprietary email? (Score:3)

    by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @02:20PM (#48205529) Homepage
    Just leave email alone. It works just fine which is why no company has been able to replace it with a proprietary alternative. I know googke is desperate to control email but it won't happen.
    • I wish we could say the same about social networking and get it out of the hands of Facebook...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        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.

      • Let's bring back forums and mailing lists. We'll party like it's 1999.
        • Or newsgroups. Sell them as government-proof decentralised forums for a new age twist.
          • Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though? No worries; Vlad Tepes would have known how to deal with it. Ten feet of rebar, right up the pooper. (He wouldn't use wooden stakes nowadays; steel recycles.)

            • 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

            • A lot of them are but they've always been that way. I think the bigger problem is simply accessibility to newsgroups. You have to know about them and possibly buy into a service. A lot of ISPs don't bother with servers or if they do you wouldn't know it unless you went hunting through their help pages. I'm not sure why ISPs care. I would have thought the bandwidth would be better (if they exclude pirating groups) so part of me would not be surprised if the likes of Google and other companies who make a livi

          • Most of my work mailing lists would work FAR better as Usenet groups.

  • Gmail already has some category thing that turned off when it came out with it. So they are re-releasing this, with more fain-fair this time?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by devjoe ( 88696 )
      Yes. They introduced a thing several months (maybe a year now) ago which gives you five inboxes instead of one. There's one for Social that catches all the stupid emails social networking things send you. There's one for Promotions that catches commercial email (at least, whatever isn't spam-boxed instead). There's one poorly defined one called Updates which is supposed to be for receipts, statements, bills, and confirmations - email related to stuff you bought or business you are involved in, as opposed to

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      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)

    by Torp ( 199297 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @03:17PM (#48206097)

    We know better than you how to organize your mail.
    They can keep it.

  • Inbox is invite-only right now, and you can email inbox@google.com to request an invite.

    I'm sending an email right now to cutegirlfriend@google.com

  • Why do I still read these comments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mikelikus ( 212556 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @03:42PM (#48206387)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by omems ( 1869410 )
      But email has been working for us for _(many)_ years. What do we need (or want) email to do that it doesn't already?
      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

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

      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.

      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

    • 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

    • 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

  • Why not try doing like the US Postal Service has been doing for approximately the past 230 years? Put the damn mail in the users inbox and leave it the fuck alone! Don't try to sort it . . . don't try to organize it . . . and certainly don't open it to see what kind of other mail the recipient might like to receive!!!!!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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)

    by dasacc22 ( 1830082 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @06:14PM (#48207933)
    How can I make sure I don't miss their important response?!

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