Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox 239
An anonymous reader writes Three Inbox by Gmail engineers today answered questions as part of a Reddit AMA session. Most of the answers were tidbits we've heard of before, but one stood out to us: Google plans to eventually replace Gmail with Inbox. In response to the question "Do you think Inbox will replace Gmail on the long road?," lead designer Jason Cornwell gave the following answer: "In the short term, no. In the very long term, we hope so. Inbox is something new — that's why we're launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users, to which Cornwell replied: "They are not aimed at fundamentally different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users."
"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, our users will decide.
We now have a new policy at Google!!!
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like that quote got cut off. Should have been, "Ultimately, our users will decide to use Inbox when we discontinue gmail."
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If they drop Gmail and don't replace it with something suitably similar and I don't get to keep my email, that'll be the end of a 10ish year run for me.
Sad times. I really do like their email service (and google voice).
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'll also be switching to a new service if they force me into some app that looks more like twitter than conventional email. Consider this garbage (from the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]):
Google scans the email account for important and similar information. It then presents what it considers the most important parts of the email first and groups similar emails as "Bundles" that are named by type (e.g., "Travel" or "Updates"). It also converts physical addresses into Google Maps links and airline confirmation numbers into a flight status update.[2] Users can make custom Bundles as they would make Gmail filters, and can specify the time of day to show the Bundle.
I don't want bundles. I don't want them timed. I don't want Google to decide what is and isn't the "most important parts". I just want to see my email in the same format it was created.
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If I have to get a new e-mail address, that gives me a chance to consider someone other than Google.
They would be nuts to remove all those customers, but stranger things have happened.
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing of it is, I don't really understand what's wrong with e-mail. I've used e-mail since my BBS days in the early nineties, graduating to fidonet, then to my first Internet-connected BBS with PINE in 1994. E-mail clients eventually followed the Usenet model and started threading replies together which is probably Gmail's best feature, and then the interconnectedness allowing mail, contacts, phone entries, docs, etc to work together helped make Google's user services extremely easy to use across devices.
I have my doubts that they can significantly improve e-mail. It still comes down to opening each e-mail and reading it, however it's parsed, sorted, compartmentalized, split, etc.
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It'll probably be based on current strategies: Run it in parallel but nag users like hell to switch over. No Yahoo, you're not getting my fricking phone number though you must have asked me a few hundred times already.
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It'll probably be based on current strategies: Run it in parallel but nag users like hell to switch over. No Yahoo, you're not getting my fricking phone number though you must have asked me a few hundred times already.
Yes, I was thinking this same thing about phone nagging. There is no "don't ask me again" button. Google does just as often. This week, Google also reminded me that an alt email address is also their target. I am not going to be giving them datamine information about who their competitors are by filling it out. It takes a special kind of people to lock themselves out of free webmail, but I'm not one of them. Regardless, webmail is NOT a bank account. It isn't a live-or-die situation like dataminers are maki
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Informative)
Re: "Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:2)
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sort the email into categories such as Misc., Forums, Purchases, Bills etc while not assigning a different label to them
Think about what you wrote. All you're doing is changing the word "label" to "category".
"Label" has a specific meaning [google.com] in gmail, it is similar to folders in other email services
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Informative)
Well, people have been switching in droves since it was introduced. Only 99.95 percent of users are still using gmail, the rest have switched to Inbox. Once it gets down to 95% or so, we'll feel comfortable with removing the gmail interface because barely anybody would be using it.
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[citation needed]
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:4, Interesting)
Or to sign up to Google plus to comment on Youtube or the Android store. Saw one poor chap put up a video because he couldn't get his quite expensive piece of equipment to work. I know the answer. Couldn't put it up. That's how you're serving your customers, Google.
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not Google's customer.
You're Google's product.
Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide" (Score:4, Interesting)
Sell it to me then, jesus. I'll happily pay a yearly subscription to Gmail if they remove all ads and data mining and don't fuck with the interface too much.
I'm adblocking anyway but I'm sure they are still churning away at my data.
So what is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?
Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It tries to turn email into some frankenstein todo list.
Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Informative)
It's aimed at fulfilling an Inbox Zero model, which basically just means it presents an empty or nearly empty inbox as much as possible. It's actually quite good at doing it in an intuitive way.
Important things stick around, unimportant things are done away with very easily, but you can still get them back if you make a mistake or change your mind. Or set a reminder so that it goes away now but reappears later, like a snooze button. Personally I like it and have not used Gmail at all since I started using Inbox.
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If I wanted a task manager or to do list, I'd have got one.
I want an email program.
Why does Google keep trying (and often failing) to tell its consumers what they want? My theory is because they aren't good at all at asking. (Case in point: nobody using Docs for anything meaningful wanted page numbers in TOCs taken away... WTF!???!!!)
Google is big, rich, and thinky. But they get their uber-nerd on with themselves and don't listen to us mere mortals.
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Sounds like it could be useful. But with the way Google is these days, it would be like accepting a lift from that creepy looking guy with the rope and duct tape on the floorboard.
Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good at asking??? They DON'T ask. They don't listen. Everything they make appears to be designed by 12 year olds for other 12 year olds. read: they're constantly changing shit for no reason other than to change it.
Re:So what is it? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure they ask. They ask each other.
Guy with piercings: Hey, look, I made it so when you, like, compose a new email this itty bitty box pops up!
Girl with shaved head: Neato! But it's, like, taking up the whole page. That's so last decade.
[clickety-clicketty-click]
Person of transient gender with dreadlocks: Yay, now you can only see three words at a time. Minimalismo!
GWSH: Better hide those scrollbars. They're so Windows XP! [1]
POTGWD: But we'll need some way to scroll, with the window being so petite.
GWSH: If you, like, move the mouse to the right quickly, that could mean "up" or something.
GWP: Inside the box, or anywhere on the screen?
GWSH & POTGWD: Anywhere on the screen, of course!
All: Awesome!
Chief UX Creative: That's what I like to hear. Let's all hop on our fixies, the whoppachoccacacamochos are on me!
All: Totally awesome!
[1] This is the earliest version any of them have heard of, let alone used.
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Damn, where's my mod points? +5 Hilariously insightful.
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Bravo.
If you take requests, consider satirizing systemd development next time.
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They got one thing right (or less wrong than the competition in that era) and have been living off it ever since.
If Picasa had been their first product we'd never have heard of them, because there wouldn't have been a second one.
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Didn't you read? This guy finds it useful.
You don't, and neither do I, but Google is trying a new product and time will tell if it finds it's market or not.
Being pissed off at the introduction of a new product is asinine. Unless you're worried that it will replace the product you like (gmail), in which case I'd agree with you, but we're far from that ever happening.
This article is just flamebait. Of course the engineers who are working on a new product hope that it will be successful. Ask the same question
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Pine rules and filters have been doing this for me since 1995.
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Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?
Inbox is a merge of Gmail with Google Now. I'm hoping they add Keep functionality to it. If they do that, I'll probably switch over full-time.
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You mean it's a merge of a *hugely dumbed down* Gmail with Google Now. The compose window is horrendous, hiding emails from me is stupid, etc. It is all that is terrible about current UX design.
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It is all that is terrible about current UX design.
There's something about "UX" that isn't terrible?
Whatever happened to user interfaces--y'know, those things that are supposed to go in between applications and us?
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Still there, but they turned from bridges into walls when beret-wearing dilettantes decided that invisible controls are "moar rad".
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Well it's not strictly webmail.
Google management are forcing users onto iOS or Google Play for Android in order to use the service.
Maybe that's just the activation but I'm not installing Android in a vm (does android-x86 include google play) just so I can then later run their webmail in firefox.
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android-x86 does not include Google Play.
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Well the registration page indicates you need an ios or android device to complete the initialization
More filtering? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I like the auto threading so much it prevents me from using a different webmail software (on my own domain). While Thunderbird has a plugin that is almost as good as Gmail (almost), I have not found a webmail software (that I can run on my own server) that is as convenient as Gmail for the threads. Roundcube can kinda do it, but it cannot show the entire thread at once.
I like the fact that 100 or so email long conversation is grouped under one heading and is visible on a single page.
Re:More filtering? (Score:4, Insightful)
Auto threading rules. There is no sense in treating each message as a separate object while it is usually part of a conversation.
It just shouldn't use the subject text. It should use the message ID's.
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You're confused by what they said. Their post wasn't about *spam* filtering. It was the filtering done to group and hide things that they did not like.
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Pardon, I thought they were implying Inbox would put advertising in the forefront and hide other, more relevant things from you in a similar fashion to some other products.
Aw crap, here we go... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Works just fine with a standard email client, though. Been using T-Bird to access my account for years.
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Does it? I've found the label system is a bit funky with IMAP, and Thunderbird seems to like downloading the same mail multiple times. I only use it to sync a backup copy, as I tend to use the web client, but I've found it's not that smooth an experience.
Other than that gmail just works for me. The tabs were a handy addition - it saves me setting up filters to keep less important stuff out of my inbox - and the spam filter is pretty much perfect. It doesn't need to change, and is a large part of me sticking
Who's their test group? (Score:2, Insightful)
What we found was that email works as a todo list for many people
Who exactly are these people? I've never seen a single person use email this way.
Re:Who's their test group? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be surprised if any half-competent business user didn't use it that way whether it is via flagged to-do items, storing them in a followup folder, archiving/deleting everything except open items or whatever ...
- If it is something you need to action and respond to, it stays in the to-do list until you action it.
- If it is a response with information from someone else, it stays in the to-do list until you have used the information.
- Otherwise, it gets filed (for reference information or ass-covering paper trails) or deleted.
On the other hand, personal users which are a big part of the Gmail user base would be quite different ...
I know MY work email is a to-do list, while my personal is like a never ending message log (a la phone SMS or IM apps) ...
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Re: Who's their test group? (Score:2)
That's what the archive is for.
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Nope. A single spot so I can search in it. Not some far away archive that I can't search in or a dozen non-backupped local archives (yes I am looking at you, Outlook).
Just an inbox with backups and a decent search function. Sadly I don't know of such a client. Gmail search sucks because it can not handle word parts. Maybe Inbox is something for me but I fear it may still use the same crappy search.
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+1. Verbing is not nearly as cool as Marketing would have us believe.
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Yet, the Oxford English Dictionary would quite clearly disagree with your statement and endorse it as a verb: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/... [oed.com]
Not to mention it is in common use and hence is correct usage by definition ...
Re:Who's their test group? (Score:5, Funny)
for those not remembering, the verb is "to act".
but of course google inbox 2034 will contain the term "actionize" instead.
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but of course google inbox 2034 will contain the term "actionize" instead.
Yes, but only for a year. Then it will be replaced, like all words in Google products, with some obscure icon on a button -- containing four seemingly random geometrical shapes and some weird lines between them -- "obviously" (according to Google's design team "experts") having the specific meaning of " actionize."
By this point, Google's support will also have replaced clear simple words with answers to their FAQ in only pictograms. Serious users simply give up and just click random buttons for five min
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Okay, I followed your suggestion, and... no verb.
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Sounds like pretty much none of them are competent then ... If you are not managing your email into a follow-up (ie to-do) vs ignore (ie done or no action) grouping you would probably need to question how organised you are.
Re:Who's their test group? (Score:5, Interesting)
I almost never see anyone who DOESN'T use it that way, at least in the business world (of course, ironically, Inbox doesn't support Google for Works yet...)
Emails are basically a queue of action items, a lot of which are resolved as "won't fix", so to speak (ie: spam, marketing emails, etc), leaving in the inbox the stuff you're supposed to get back to at some point.
Inbox is fantastic for that.
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I've seen it on occasion, even beyond "to-do list" meaning "these are the emails I still need to respond to." Some people will send themselves emails containing notes and action items just so all their shit is in one place, because handling an inbox that's separate from a to-do list that's separate from a calendar is just too complicated for them, the poor dears. There's a significant overlap between this group and the group that prints out every incoming email for reading.
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"These are the emails I need to respond to" (or look at, or deal with, or whatever...not necessarily actually reply to) is what they meant by to-do list. They didn't mean the scenario where people send emails to themselves as todos.
Inbox is basically done that way. You can even flag emails to be "resent" to yourself later. ie: I get my credit card statement along a ton of other emails, so I'll forget to pay it. Instead of creating a reminder, you just flag the email and it goes away. The next day, you "rece
Re:Who's their test group? (Score:4, Informative)
(1) open gmail in a browser on work pc
(2) type in shopping list, autosaved as draft
(3) open draft email on phone while at supermarket
turns out you don't need an app for that because draft emails sync to multiple devices.
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I use it that way. A to do list that others can put items on.
My boss mails me "Do x for project Y". I read it, then I either do it directly or mark it as unread and do it later.
Unread mails still require an action, whether it is reading it or doing what it says.
Incredibly useful, even with current email interfaces.
Gmail is already pretty good... (Score:5, Insightful)
As an IMAP back end for a real email client.
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They still support POP3 as well.
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No, it really isn't. Labels do not play well with IMAP and I find it keeps downloading the same mail dozens of times.
Plus the inbox categories (social and promotions) save me from setting up filters for stuff. Trouble is, that's not reflected in IMAP so that stuff still ends up in my inbox.
Wow, seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Google,
Hi. My name is grasshoppa. You may know me from such famous threads as "Windows 8 Sucks" and "Windows 8 User Interface, wtf?". You may remember that I, along with a multitude of others, warned MS about making such a radical change to the desktop. No, wait, that's not quite right; we warned against FORCING such a radical change to the desktop. But we were assured by various astroturfers that windows 8 was the bees knees, the mutts nuts and various other wonderous bits of animals ( thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett, for that phrase ). We were called all sorts of various names for our opinions. Yet many of us stuck to our guns; we knew that a mobile interface force fed to desktop users was a recipe for failure.
Please. Listen to us now. This is a remarkable bad idea. This is the kind of idea your competitors DREAM of you implementing. It's really the only way they can get a foot hold into your market. And make no mistake; a foot hold will be all they need, because once you start down this road ( and, inevitably back track a week later due to overwhelming user criticism ), you have lost your momentum. You have lost the confidence necessary to stay that one step ahead of them. And they will then proceed to eat your lunch.
Who am I? No one really. Just some poor schmuck that will have to work with YOUR end users when you force feed them a UI change. And I'm already resentful for it.
So please. For the love of all you hold dear, PLEASE DO NOT FORCE A NEW INTERFACE on people.
What actually is Inbox? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Google page just says that it will be good for me.
It looks generally like a dumbed down phone style app. "lots of whitespace" etc.
There is a *lot* of room for improvement in GMail that does not involve pissing about with the UI. Like being able to add a summary to an email thread. Like being able to break email threads which become muddled. Like being able to add additional meta data do emails and use them for simple applications. People have been asking for these for years, but the MBAs that now seem to run Google do not listen.
But it does not look like Inbox is any of these things,.
Anyone actually tried it?
This is moderately insane (Score:2)
I've used gmail since it was a baby, but at least I always used redirected emails that point there. So I can, in theory, switch out. I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
I know they hinted at it being some far future change, but just being willing to say it at all is nuts. Gmail is a smashing success, that they would want to redefine email based on some user interface study is scary as shit.
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> I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
What, exactly, is preventing you from archiving what you have /right now/? What is preventing you from setting your IMAP/POP client to continually store in local folders?
Been using Tbird to access Gmail for years now. I don't see your problem.
--
BMO
You can offer a new option... (Score:2)
... and see which one works better.
Before you force users looking for alternatives just because someone made a bad decision
Where's the standard ? (Score:3)
I'm not in until I can switch clients and servers. My current IMAP system lets me use pretty much any email provider and any email client I want.Over the years, I've used several of each of those, and figure I'll have to keep switching once in a while.
Inbox pretty much locks me in to gmail and Inbox (or dial it back to a regular email client). That doesn't work for me, no matter what its features. Amongs which local backup seems to be missing.
Hangouts (Score:2)
Emacs Blows Them Out of The Water (Score:2)
My thoughts on Gmail (Score:2)
I hate the threading feature too. That takes much getting used to on their web product.
Inbox is Getting Things Done (Score:2)
.. or at least, it should be. It obviously has some nods to the methodology, like deferring actions for later.
What it needs is better context support, a proper 'tickler', and a full-featured API.
Google being Google (Score:2)
Now I can't say for sure how many people did move to G+. What I can absolutely say is that I'm not one of them. I used to use iGoogle and now I use My Yahoo. So instead of enjoying whatever metri
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the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders
Interesting, I thought the most basic and oldest function of email was sending a message.
Re:Google engineers... (Score:4, Insightful)
Folders wouldn't work as well as tags for semantic data snarfing. Also it's one of those "competitive features" that they can rightly claim no other email client provides in the same way -- that it also totally effs up IMAP/POP folders and drags you to the web interface as much as possible is a bonus.
You can tell somebody at the Googleplex still smarting over the Wave debacle.
Re:Google engineers... (Score:4, Informative)
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Because labels are still stupid: if I delete something under one label, I don't necessarily want it deleted everywhere. But that isn't the interface on offer either - there's no "hardlink" style functionality.
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Disclaimer: I don't use web mail, for anything.
Threaded email pre-dates Gmail, it even predates Google. I've used threaded email clients since the early 1990s. Just because you haven't seen it before doesn't mean that Google 'invented' it. Oh, and applying threads to Webmail doesn't count as invention.
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Sure, Usenet viewers used threading back in the 1990s.
But inventing something is nothing. Popularizing is everything. Until GMail ALL the major mail clients just used a nasty sent mail box. Thunderbird, Outlook, Lotus, Eudora, all of them.
Anthony
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Labels can be made hierarchical in Gmail.
In day to day use the only difference is that a mail (or more precisely, a conversation) can only be in one folder but can have multiple labels.
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They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders
This might be an annoyance if you use the Gmail webclient but; K-9, Outlook and Thunderbird display all my labels as folders when connected to Gmail via IMAP, and I noticed in the webmail client you can make sub-labels too so I guess I always took 'Label' as Google-speak for 'Folder.'
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They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
That's a primary reason I stuck with Yahoo email for way too long: I didn't like the labeling system that Gmail provides as an alternative to folders. ("When all you have is a search engine hammer, everything looks like a search nail.") Finally, I decided to give in and use Gmail as my primary email service, labels and all. Why? Partly because Yahoo forced a new user interface on me that I didn't like, by shutting down the old version after initially allowing the old and new versions to coexist.
(Which ma
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I have found a very good job near where I live and I have simply "canceled" their hiring "process" in the middle. Imagine: dozens phone calls to organize dozens of "interviews", scattered around the world. I have stopped around 5th or 6th "interview", which was around 9-12 month into the "process". In other words, I wasn't hired by Google on technicality that I got bored waiting (and found good job ~20min walking distance from home!)
All in all, I was pretty surprised to find that the hiring process in Goo
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I use pine and its rules, filters and roles since 1995, never looked back, it still works fine today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It would help if the headline would parse.
I'm still trying to figure out what's intended by using "one" as a verb.
Re: Please no (Score:2)
Google hopes to, one day, replace gmail with inbox.
Would have been clearer if they'd said "someday" or "eventually," but if you heard it out loud it'd be fine.
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Google hopes to replace gmail with inbox one day.
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Not necessarily. Before gmail, I paid for my email, and it sucked worse than gmail ever did.