Google Launches Gmail Add-ons and Brings a Range of Business Tools To the Inbox (betanews.com) 64
Google today launched Gmail Add-ons after a beta testing period as a developer preview earlier in the year. From a report: Gmail Add-ons are extensions that bring a number of big-name services -- such as Trello, Wrike and Asana -- to your inbox. While there's a definite business and enterprise bias, it's something that available to everyone, starting right now. The arrival of Gmail Add-ons is Google's recognition of the fact that many people now spend a huge amount of time in their inboxes, and the company is trying to make its email service even more useful. Pleasingly, add-ons are available on both the web and on Android, and Google explains that "your inbox can contextually surface your go-to app based on messages you receive to help you get things done faster."
Re:oh boy, lets crap up the interface some more (Score:5, Funny)
Re: oh boy, lets crap up the interface some more (Score:1)
Last I remember they don't read business (i.e. paid for) Gmail accounts.
AlphaBeta (Score:5, Funny)
Will remain in beta until discontinued.
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This lovely bit.
"people now spend a huge amount of time in their inboxes"
Did they just notice this? Most large companies use outlook for a reason. It is the best email program you can buy today. It is far better than the free ones. The problem is cost of outlook plus exchange is why most people flip over to the other alternatives.
Some of the large companies I worked for getting 200-300 emails a day was not uncommon. I knew people who got 1500 plus a day. Without filters and folders that was totally un
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What do you mean by the "free ones"? You mean free software or free beer?
Is there any specific features in Outlook that are so unique ?
Who the hell is getting 1500 mail a day? Is that real job? Does this guy do anything but read mails during the day?
I havent seen Outlook being used since a while but, in any case, I have no recollection of it being such a smart and superior software.
Your message, sir, look like a cheap advertisement.
If you are working some sort of technical support and depending on the scope of your team/role/the inbox 1500 a day is definitely believable, but based on my experience a significant portion of these will be automated alerts.
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If your working in support and your NMS is sending you 1500 emails a day you need a better NMS and/or a whole lot more automation.
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The main advantage of Outlook is the ability to have multiple messages open in their own windows. Primarily so you can be working on an outgoing email for hours during which time you can also deal with any new incoming stuff.
Gmail is great as an email app for short messages. Outlook invites you to use it in place of a word processor. In fact, I almost never fire up Word at work (or Libre Writer at home) - preferring to do my 'writing' such as it is, in my email client. Gmail is okay for this. Outlook i
Re: AlphaBeta (Score:2)
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Will remain in beta until discontinued.
I agree, sadly.
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana? (Score:3)
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana and why would I want them (either for business or personal use)?
Re:What are Trello, Wrike and Asana? (Score:5, Funny)
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana and why would I want them (either for business or personal use)?
If only Google had a service that you could type this into and get more information about it....
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I would if TFS wouldn't have called them "big-name services".
Google wish list (Score:5, Interesting)
What are Trello, Wrike and Asana and why would I want them (either for business or personal use)?
If only Google had a service that you could type this into and get more information about it....
If only Google would spend some time making their UI better.
Delete is a trashcan icon when reading, but different when viewing the inbox. "Select all" means "select the first 50" (have to do that numerous times to actually select/delete *all* messages), "reply" is down at the bottom of "conversation" mode so that you have to scroll down many pages to reach it, "cc" and "bcc" are hidden *until* you click in the "to" line...
Many, many confusing and inconsistent interface choices, there's no overriding theme or standard that can be used to find functions you need, and many useful things are inconveniently positioned and not easy to see. I count 8 dropdown boxes for various functions on the GMail page, normal rules for "selection" (click, and see item highlighted) are different from every other program on my computer, it's just a mess.
You're forced to "guess and look" to do just about anything.
To get a feel for what I mean: deleting an item from the inbox is a very common action, so why is it hidden (until I mark a checkbox) and why does (this really common feature) take several steps? For all the bad things we say about Apple, at least they know how to make a good interface.
Re:Google wish list (Score:5, Informative)
Delete is a trashcan icon when reading, but different when viewing the inbox.
No, it's a trash can in both cases. When viewing the inbox it's not visible at all unless you select one or more emails.
"Select all" means "select the first 50"
Actually it means select all 50 that are showing.
have to do that numerous times to actually select/delete *all* messages
Well, if "numerous times" means "one more click".
You click "select all" to select all that are visible (50), then you get a little message that says "All 50 conversations on this page are selected", and a link to click to select all conversations, period. So, two clicks to select all if you have more than 50. The alternative is to have "select all" select a bunch of stuff that isn't being displayed, which could well confuse people.
"reply" is down at the bottom of "conversation" mode so that you have to scroll down many pages to reach
But all of the previous messages in the conversation are automatically hidden, so you normally only have to scroll past the part that you should read before replying. Assuming you read your email before replying to it.
Sigh. I typed a screed about the evils of top-posting and the value of proper trimming. But nobody other than oldsters like me even know what any of that means, so I should just give up.
"cc" and "bcc" are hidden *until* you click in the "to" line...
Most people consider that a feature, since it avoids wasting screen space on unneeded fields in the common case. And it's pretty unsurprising that when you want to edit who you're sending the message to, you click in the "to" area, and then the variations in how you're going to include them pop up.
To get a feel for what I mean: deleting an item from the inbox is a very common action, so why is it hidden (until I mark a checkbox)
Well, until Gmail incorporates eye tracking, how is it supposed to know which of the emails in your inbox you want to delete? If you click on one of them, it opens and you can delete it. If you want to delete one without opening it, you mark it (normally this is expected to be used only for bulk actions... where you mark several and then delete them at once).
why does (this really common feature) take several steps?
It takes the minimum possible number of steps: two. This is the minimum possible because you have to tell Gmail which email you want to do something to, and then you have to tell it what to do. The only way to turn that into a single step would be to include a "delete" icon next to every email which would consume a huge amount of screen real-estate to no purpose. The extra click is a better solution.
For all the bad things we say about Apple, at least they know how to make a good interface.
I can think of plenty of bad things to say about Google UIs, and about Gmail in particular, but none of yours make any sense.
BTW, in the spirit of pointing out undiscoverable features, I highly recommend that you type a question mark next time you're looking at your Gmail inbox. A little effort invested in learning the keyboard shortcuts pays huge dividends.
Re:Google wish list (Score:5, Insightful)
Explaining to a user why they're wrong for disliking a user interface is a major problem with UI designers. Maybe spend more time listening and you might be able to design a better interface.
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If you require to reeducate the user to do it your way then it is you that is wrong as the designer.
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Explaining to a user why they're wrong for disliking a user interface is a major problem with UI designers. Maybe spend more time listening and you might be able to design a better interface.
I'm not a UI designer, never claimed to be. In fact if my 30-year career as a software developer has a consistent thread running through it, it's staying as far as possible from UI.
But if you actually read my comment, you'll see that much of it was pointing out that his description of how the UI works is factually incorrect. Makes me wonder if he actually uses Gmail.
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I'm not certain, but I strongly suspect you are both right.
Okian Warrior noted several things that I thought were true, such as select all only selecting the messages displayed on the screen, and requiring you to go to the next page and then select all those, repeating ad nauseam. I've done that a few times, and I'd surely remember if there was an easy second click to actually select all messages in that collection. Google probably updated Gmail with that additional feature/fix/whatever.
The trashcan on the
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Asana is a pretty popular project management web application. At least, it was popular three years ago. I don't know about now.
If nothing else, Asana helps you keep track of what everybody is doing on your team without needing to receive a zillion emails from everyone every time they accept a job, request something, update a status, or need the approval for something.
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I bring thee from the unexplored land called The Fine Article:
The company shares a list of the currently available add-ons:
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I bring thee from the unexplored land called The Fine Article:
Did you read what you posted? I read TFA before I asked the question -- a recursive definition is not a definition. Saying that the Asana plugin lets you use Asana doesn't really help - what is Asana and why would I want to use it over some other product? Similarly, saying that the Trello plugin lets me use Trello doesn't really help. Are Trello and Asana the same? What about Wrike, which is not mentioned at all?
The company shares a list of the currently available add-ons:
But no S/MIME / GPG / PGP? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand why they don't add these, but come on. Those should be the first add-ons added. There are even browser add-ons that add S/MIME functionality to gmail and other web based clients (ie. it can and has been proven/done).
I don't want an interface to quickbooks in my email client. I want an interface to standard email features in my email client.
Re:But no S/MIME / GPG / PGP? (Score:5, Informative)
I understand why they don't add these, but come on. Those should be the first add-ons added. There are even browser add-ons that add S/MIME functionality to gmail and other web based clients (ie. it can and has been proven/done).
No sense in trusting google to handle that for you. Try Mailvelope [mailvelope.com] or WebPG [webpg.org].
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No sense in trusting google
The whole point of using open standards like S/MIME is you don't need to trust anything. It will either work or it won't, and you can easily verify the former.
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Isn't that the point of the add-ons? Mailvelope and WebPG could then be offered as add-ons, instead of browser extensions. The gmail add-on would extend the base of people that could use it with gmail (ex. on mobile web clients, safari, MSIE, opera, mobile gmail app, etc), though it is product-specific (gmail only, not other webmail providers).
Also, neither of those does S/MIME. I'm pretty sure there are similar solutions for S/MIME, but again, this should be part of the mail client (IMO).
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1. they already allow it via other methods:
a) use mailvelope, webpg, etc and the existing webmail infrastructure
b) use any standard IMAP client (a couple examples: k9mail on android; outlook, thunderbird, alpine, etc etc etc elsewhere)
2. maybe you don't understand what gpg/pgp/smime do? Yes, they can encrypt, but they're more commonly used to sign, which ensures the message content isn't modified at any point. This would NOT impact their ability to data harvest.
3. they can still mine info from encrypted ema
I hope they make a Buzz add-on (Score:4, Funny)
I really miss Buzz
Re: I hope they make a Buzz add-on (Score:1)
This wasn't a joke.
I liked having a special folder to keep up with a few people and not be overwhelmed with nonsense.
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I can imagine nothing worse than NN 4.7
A terrible blast from the past.
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Before you could count to five, it had already fizzled.
Email is so last decade (Score:1)
A lot of heuristic analytics are showing that consumers are starting to drop email, actually, and that adding chrome like add on services to such is mostly a waste of time.
It's time for another seismic shift, and rearranging the deckchairs like this won't stop it.
It's all about staying logged in (Score:2)
Using a computer to access Gmail, I log out after or it tracks everything google related.
Cell phone (secondary gmail) I don't have that luxury, somehow subscribing to Youtube's FailArmy and a notification every time a new video is posted.
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Gmail supports IMAP. Use a mail client. Your phone most likely already has one.
No It's not logging out of gmail. Android your always logged into Google. At my start screen is a blue circle in the top right saying I'm logged it.
I read it's possible to log out but lose all Google services (I'm thinking about that one).
I for one don't mind Google tracking, I feel it's payback for Google Earth and such. It's them or other, I just don't give it to them by using 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4
Thank you though for the advice on the blocking.
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On the desktop, use a separate Firefox Container Tab just for Gmail. On your mobile, as suggested use IMAP or even a dedicated web browser just for GMail. It's really not that complicated. Of course you can also use a privacy blocker like uBlock, Noscript, etc. to avoid being tracked across the web.
Still waiting for ORDER BY (Score:2)
Really Google - addons? I've been waiting since the first web keyword introduction for a simple to implement 'ORDER BY' command. I've embraced the "search don't file" mailbox management style, but lack of ORDER BY output is nuts.
I just want the Hangout Effects Add-On back (Score:2)
"Surface your go-to app" (Score:1)
Let this surface as fair warning.
Productivity tools vs actually getting stuff done (Score:2)
I used to leave my mail open all the time, be logged into chat (a former boss actually required it!), etc. - in all ways trying to stay as connected as possible at all times, in the name of collaboration and productivity.
What I've learned, though, over the years... once I started turning those things off for much of the day, I actually started getting work done. I have co-workers who are always logged into Slack and swear it's helping them work - but it sure seems like they aren't actually talking about wor
If you spend a lot of time in your inbox... (Score:1)
What about Inbox? (Score:3)
I don't understand Google's strategy at all. It pushed us all to move to Google Inbox, and then basically just left it alone, without really expanding its feature set. Now it's adding new features to the old Gmail. What is going on? It's hard to comprehend their strategy, though I shouldn't be surprised with their track record. Google really just needs to combine the two products, perhaps adding an "Inbox" mode to Gmail. Perhaps this is laying the groundwork for that, and Inbox could be coming as a future add-on?
Gmail for business email? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because you use Google's G Suite for work and pay them to be your email provider.
Email is not absurdly cheap when you have to provide your own hosting hardware, make sure it stays online w/ 5+ 9's availability and provide near infinite inbox sizes. For $10/month/user you get all that from Google...plus access to their other apps (Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc).
G Suite Business accounts are not data-mined.
https://support.google.com/goo... [google.com]
Stop it (Score:1)
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