These comments are pretty sad. I know we feel the need to comment on everything right away these days, but honestly there isn't much to say about this feature until we've actually used it.
HN almost universally believes in execution over the idea, yet here we are trashing an idea before seeing the execution. It's great that Gmail is trying to innovate and improve the email experience. Maybe this feature won't work out but how about we try it out first?
While this UI might have changed a little, the feature set isn't new. The Smartlabels Gmail Labs experiment does the same automatic categorizing and filtering. I have used the experiment for a while and it is really pretty good about knowing what is what and in turn minimizing the amount of email that I see as soon as it arrives. In my experience it has been much more helpful than priority inbox system that Google rolled out a while back.
It may look the same, but I think you are missing a bigger picture.
Google is at the forefront of machine learning. They have been doing it for a long time, and lately, they have taken it to a different level with new features rolled out across their various services.
For example, and you'd probably know, in Google Plus, now you can search pictures by the subject which can purely analyzes the data (without meta-data) and give you all the pictures of your cat.
I guess this new Inbox works in the same vein - I don't think it's just a big table of senders and their classifications - this seems to be more intelligent than that.
But it's okay to blindly criticize Google - in fact, it happens automatically if you are using a Macbook Air.
I am not sure what you think I am missing. Google has offered this type of filtering before. I have continued to use it for the last year and really enjoy it.
The already existing feature is more intelligent than "a big table of senders". For example, some of the emails I receive from Amazon are sent directly to me as notifications and some are filtered away into Promotions to be viewed on my schedule. It is smart enough to know that I don't want my day interrupted by Amazon's next sale but do want to see my order confirmations from Amazon as soon as they are received.
I am not criticizing Google, I am just noting that this is not a new feature but a Gmail labs experiment graduating into the main Gmail feature set with a fresh new coat of UI polish.
Google Labs is a place where they incubate awesome ideas and features.
Then they launch it into the main project and people hate it.
Then they kill it.
You would hardly know how the typical consumer is going to use/like it from that data though (not that I do not agree that that might be a good idea, maybe they just want to get it out soon).
It's not necessarily about users liking them as much as just getting the features out before as many eyeballs and browser/system combos as possible before introducing them to the whole world.
I agree it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction, but we also have to consider the fact that people who don't like something are much more likely to speak out than people who are neutral or positive. Take into consideration how every major Facebook change has been met with a seemingly loud "boycott Facebook" petition.. on Facebook. We can't really over-police these things.
But on the other hand, what other type of reaction is possible to a blog post that advertises a new feature that most people cannot try out yet and form measured reactions to?
Just FWIW, I love the new Gmail compose as well. It is indeed useful to be able to go through and consult previous emails without doing the back and forth for writing one mail. And I really love Gmail for all the small convenience things they keep on doing, like including a 'Track Package' button in the 'product shipping' email's subject itself ! As far as I know, they were the first to do many innovative things, like drag and drop to attach files! They shouldn't stop trying new things.
Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusable. It breaks a number of things for me that I actually use in my work on a daily basis.
Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
I like it too. I can write multiple emails at once, and a chat box will never be in the way of the composer. Maybe there should be a "snap back into page" button thing, but people seem to forget that there is a pop out button if you want a more mono-tasking email style.
Additionally, with this interface, it could be more integrated with hangouts and cross google's services (maybe easier send email pop up on andriod tablets?).
I think that's a fundamental difference in working style. I never write multiple emails at once, nor have I wanted to. To me that is clutter.
The "pop out" choice is a poor one since it turns Compose into 3 operations: Press compose, press the pop-out button, press maximize on the new window.
(as for the chat box, I use Minimalist, and my Gmail UI is trimmed of anything extraneous).
the in-page-pop-up composer is just a lame substitute for people that don't know how to click "Compose" with the middle button (or pressing the modifier key of choice). Well, you don't even have to know that, just open a new tab and type gmail<Ctrl+Enter> and you can reference your other emails while writing.
the problem with google launch for that feature is that they DID NOT give the choice.
So, people that is not slow and know how to use tabs effectively, got their writing space crippled. and it became a pain to actually see the email i wanted under the in-page-popup composer. because you know, some people have 10inch screens.
at least now they made it available to go back to the old format. ...that will give me a few more months to look to a gmail alternative.
I too prefer the new compose, my only gripe is the unnecessary collapsing of attaching things other than files on the hard drive. The thing I attach most often is an image at a web address, to do so I have to hover the +, click "insert photo", select the web address option, paste in the web address and then click ok. Far too many steps.
yeah the toolbar is annoying, I have to navigate 2 menus to quote some text.
I'm guessing it's optimized for non-power users, but it should at least be customizable, or better yet learn which icons are most used and bring them to the main toolbar.
I think these are completely intentional. Additional steps made for the few that use that stuff, and hiding out the complexity for the big majority that doesn't want that.
I don't think they would ever create anything without a decent reasoning behind it. May not be your reasoning, but there is one.
Agreed here, same with me. I might end up writing a greasemonkey script for the same soon (quickly insert image via url). If someone is more motivated than me, feel free to do it and share :).
I have wanted that exactly zero times. But I wouldn't object to the the new compose if you could maximize it without popping it out into a new window, and make that the default. The problem is not the new features, but the functionality they removed.
I'm neutral about it, overall. I find the window ridiculously small (or ridiculously big if you maximise it), and I hate the hidden formatting bar - I use formatting a lot, so the extra click to reveal it and then the hassle of it covering content is a pain.
So how about making the window sizeable, and remember the user's preference? And maybe when it's over a certain size the formatting bar gets permanent screen space.
Nice, thank you. I dislike new compose, but am finding big advantages as well because its forced me to learn keyboard shortcuts.
Now if only there was a shortcut for 'reply/forward in new tab' or I could change the default size for cmd+r reply in new window or gmail remembered the dimensions I last resized the new window to.
Agreed. But I for one, can't stand it. I don't like composing emails on top of other things in the background. I find it jarring. For similar reasons, I also don't like the reply mode where you are editing within a conversation.
I guess I like viewing messages in the context of a conversation, but not composing them that way. I just wish that I had the option of composing things separately.
I don't want the visual clutter of having other stuff behind the message I'm writing, and I want to use the full screen, or close to it. The new compose forced me to "pop out" the window and maximize it, leaving compose to be 3 operations.
As several people have pointed out there's actually a keyboard shortcut that does what I want ("d") I didn't know about, so now I'm at least slightly less grumpy about it.
I think some people might think that there is too much clutter in the "background" with that list of emails and all. But, this is not so much a problem if you have a cleared CSS-edited pretty unread/important/read gmail like mine.
I have two displays, my secondary with my email browser on it is to the right of me. With the new compose, writing emails is confined to the utter right most corner of my work area.
As you might have guessed, I hate the new compose...
I think it's a little unfair to overly judge them over one mistake. Also, I didn't like the original redesign, but they've toned it down since then and brought it back so they do seem to be corrective.
There was also the previous design change as you note, which I hated enough to install Minimalist to change the appearance. By now my Gmail looks nothing like the standard Gmail.
Just because GMail is still better than AOL or Hotmail doesn't mean I agree with the direction it (and Google as a whole when related to Google+ is concerned) is going in.
To be clear, I would be fairly optimistic for the "new Inbox" if it weren't for the new GChat interface which worsened my user experience to add a feature, Google+ integration, I don't necessarily want.
The complaints are not about change in general, but about changes that are simultaneously negative and inescapable. If a new version is better, then great -- but if it is worse and you cannot continue to use the old version, you have every right to complain. I avoid being dependent on web apps for this very reason: I like to be able to downgrade when necessary.
The opposite is true. I don't need to know anything more about this feature to conclude: 1. it's anti-useful for me and 2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach.
What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.
How is it anti-useful? In which way does it hinder anything useful?
>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
It is not. It is a buttonbar for selecting pre-categorized mails. It does nothing against email itself and doesn't change its usefuleness for discussions at all.
>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
I'd love to hear you expand on this, because for me it seems like the exact opposite. By taking extraneous and superficial emails out of the main view, doesn't this make e-mail better suited for serious discourse?
People who are serious about email don't have this problem. The feature isn't useful much as medication for metabolic syndrome isn't useful to athletes. More generally, statistical filters I can't train are useless -- like gmail's spam filter. That's one reason I don't use gmail (I keep an account for testing). I host my own mail and my own statistical filter, which takes care of three nines of anything that isn't real correspondence with no false positives. This was a solved problem in 2003. But rather than provide features that help users learn to train their filters, google followed the other webmail providers with a shared filter. That leads to a high false positive rate (despite rigorously training it since 2004, my gmail spam box has about one false positive a month).
Then there's automatic signature hiding, hiding of addressees, lack of support for constant-width typography, integration of bullshit from Plus (like insisting on autocompleting names from Plus rather than what's been previously sent and received), many facets of the new "compose experience", etc.
Google have made it clear they intend to be the McDonalds of software. Too bad... I used to be such a fan. But since they make ad-supported software, the McDonalds equilibrium was bound to obtain eventually.
Well, the thing is that the better the product gets, the bigger chance there is that any new incremental change to the parts that work good (as opposed to adding new features) will screw them up. GMail has been excellent for years, so it's understandable people get worried about such changes.
While I do agree with your sentiment that some are being too quick to dismiss the idea without trying it, I'd like to add that this feature (or one very much like it) has actually been available in Labs for a while, so it's possible that some commenters may have real feedback on it already.
Isn't it more like min(idea, execution)? Good execution of a bad idea (if that's even possible) is still a bad thing (not that I think this is a bad idea).
> So you think that it's worse than min(idea, execution)?
Generally, yes, or at least "not better and usually worse."
But I said "more like idea * execution" -- compared to min(idea, execution) -- and the "more like" is important. Its not a strict mathematical relationship, and sometimes an imperfect implementation of an imperfect concept will end up better than either the implementation or the concept because it will be equivalent to a better implementation of a better concept by accident. But that's kind of exceptional case.
You can't directly compare numerical values of "idea" to "idea * execution": the two are conceptually different things.
To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a force of "6 Newtons", even though the two are related by F = m * a. Similarly here, dragonwriter is defining "quality = idea * execution", so there's no reason to expect that the numerical value of this notion of quality should be directly comparable to the numerical value of either of its components. (Comparing the value of "quality" defined this way to the value of "idea" would require assuming some specific value for "execution" for the comparison to be sensible. If you just compare the numbers directly, you're assuming perfect 1.0 execution, which probably isn't what you intended.)
Your complaint is a common one and essentially boils down to, "There are many comments here that are not appropriate for HN."
People can say what they want to say, at least within HN guidelines. It's not like these are YouTube comments. And I'm not sure about the almost universal belief in execution over idea either, or at least I'm happy to be one of your counterexamples. Can't both be important?
Finally, it's not like Google's proposal is equivalent to some kid's after-school project. Context matters, and in the latter case it would be quite unfair to trash it. If anything, people know that parts of Google read HN and hope somehow that their voices get heard.
Sure, but communications are also important. If this post is giving an incorrect impression of these new features, there might be something for all of us to learn about how to communicate things to our customers.
Im not going to say anything what so ever about gmail, even though I have an account, almost by some sort of weirdo default.
I'm just going to stick with dear old yahoo mail and leave it at that. Its might be old, even stagnant, but it is simple, clear, functional and causes me zero grief. As it has done for 15 odd years.
well, let's say the majority of people are "smart" enough to not comment on something. Then you only get comments from the "stupid" people, giving an appearance those comments are from the majority, rather than a less constrained minority.
1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all. You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created.
2) When you turn it on, it disables Gmail's multiple inbox. Multiple inbox is the only thing saving my email from being a complete and utter disaster right now.
3) Judging by how they are forcing the new compose on everyone it is reasonable to expect that they will force us to use this as well. (The new compose screws up at least two workflows for me, btw. For example, sending a form email to several people is now a pain because I have to manually click "edit subject" to remove the "Fwd:"). If they force this on me, it will completely destroy my ability to use gmail. If they want me to leave gmail for good, that would be the way to guarantee it.
I wish they would have taken more time to better support tabbed browsing instead of implementing their own floating compose windows in javascript.
Now they've implemented their own version of tabs.
Just support native browser controls, please. People understand them. They're simple. They work. The more stuff they add, the heavier Gmail becomes... and the more of a pain it is to load in multiple real tabs.
I'd like to once again recommend trying the Basic Html view. You can middle-click the compose button (or any link, really) and it opens in a new tab. It's super helpful for keeping multiple emails open to reference while writing a new one (which is what the floaty javascript compose window is supposed to solve, but it doesn't really)
"...and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created."
Sure you can. Just drag an email between them. It gives you the option to permanently move emails from that sender to a specific tab. Presumably, it also adapts to your selections, much like their priority and spam filters.
The new compose has at least 4 things that are broken for me:
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
No can do. I refuse to turn shortcuts on because there are at least 2 (and maybe more I'm not aware of) ways to send the email I'm currently drafting. Command + Enter, or hitting shift, then enter.
I've learned from past email programs that's a recipe for disaster. Turn those two off and I'd gladly use keyboard shortcuts.
Used to have 2 (old one, and pop out), now it has 2 (new one and pop out). (there is also the look for reply, and for chatting (which i use even if other is offline sometimes instead of a quick email), and the ability to revert to the old look)
By this logic, the old one is at least as fascist. Additionally, while you might not like the new style, "real" feature was removed, but the ability to write multiple emails at once, or write one while one is open, were added.
Edit: I just tried to old one to see it again. It is rather bulky. It needed a UI update of some kind at least. (which may have been accomplished not semi-popped out, i guess)
Technically, you still have two compose interfaces, but they have promised to remove the oldest one. To get the old interface, click the little downward pointing arrow and select "Temporarily switch back to old compose".
Oooh I like this very much, though it looks like I'm not allowed to play with it just yet on my account.
Labels and filters solve several Gmail problems but demand too much footwork on my part. I found that my Gmail experience got better when I adopted this credo about two weeks ago:
Thou shalt have but one Gmail label, and that label's name shalt be "Needs Reply".
Either it can wait, and be there when I specifically look (search) for it, or it needs a reply. I need to know which emails need replies, and I generally need to label them manually.
Labels beyond this I view as a distraction. I used to label everything, now I label nothing. The fewer you can use the better, I think.
And yet I still want a label or two for all the semi-solicited mail I get. Things that I do not need in my inbox, but ought to be there for my idle perusement: Banana Republic sales, MyHabit "deals", Newegg dailies, Kindle book of the day deals, and so on.
And then there are things like Facebook updates. Nice to know, but I'll get to them eventually anyway the next time I open up Facebook, which I look at about as much as my grandmother checks the weather (read: Every hour, and for no reason).
If this wants to distill my system for me then I'm ready with open arms. Bigger tabs at the top are way better than a hard-to-parse list on the side. Can't they turn it off for a complainer and roll it out to me?
That's really interesting. You don't even label emails you've archived? I like to chuck "invoice" on everything that represents money changing hands: actual invoices, e-purchase emails (congrats on buying this game / software, here is your key), stuff like that. I also have a few others about specific topics.
In terms of labeling emails that need replies for me if it's still in the inbox if it needs a reply / action. If I'm done with an email I archive it.
I think that labels become problematic because the more things you label, the closer looking at "All emails labeled X" looks just like a search.
In other words, to be the most useful, a label needs to have as few uses as possible, or else become a separate folder for perusing. And if a label looks just like a search, skip the clutter and just do the search. If its a bin for perusing, well, good on this new feature.
I can't imagine when I'd want to view all emails labeled "Invoice", for instance. If I know I'm looking for a software key, then doing a search will be much faster than clicking on the label and eyeballing it for the right one.
In your example that's also something you have to label manually. If you forget one and then look through the "Invoice" label folder and don't find it, you have to go do a search anyway. As much as possible I want to reduce the number of things that could be screwed up by mere forgetfulness. So by not using labels there is no chance of screwing it up, and there's less work to do to boot.
So I'd rather not concern myself with taking the time to organize my to-be-archived emails into labels unless it represents a non-trivial gain, and I don't think the gains are very large in nearly every practical case. "Needs-reply" is the only one, since it represents a separate queue of to-do emails.
That doesn't fit the bill and would be efficient if you only had 1 sender per label. Nearly all of my labels have a one-to-many relationship, and so recreating that 'search' would first require me to remember each of the parties involved, find their email address, and then manually construct the query. I think his example is poor use, I think the suggested usage pattern is to take the 10s the first time you have a new contact (that falls under a label) and filter all future messages, making it a 1-click operation to access that archive going forward.
I think your logic is seriously flawed, but as long as it's your email and not mine, so be it!
> I think that labels become problematic because the more things you label, the closer looking at "All emails labeled X" looks just like a search.
Labelling is a way of demonstrating intent, though. I want to see tax-related invoices for the organisation I'm helping out with; not everything actually has the words "invoice" in it, or mention the organisation.
Either you need to introduce AI for me to teach, or let me impose search information on the email itself. Tagging is just a way of doing the latter.
I like to keep a Zero Inbox as well so labelling things is absolutely essential, I have over 20 labels. Seeing the 2000 unread emails in my girlfriends inbox makes my eye twitch.
Every time I read comments on HN about how people have these "amazing" systems of filtering and labeling in gmail I always wonder if there's anyone else who uses gmail like I use it.... turns out there is and they've doubled my high score.
The owner of the (small) company I work at has 55k+ unread in his inbox. I suggested a few weeks ago he move to the priority inbox in an attempt to deal with the crazy inflow he manages.
Thou shalt have but one Gmail label, and that label's name shalt be "Needs Reply".
I'm glad this works for you, but keeping track of and searching through years of emails -- and chats -- with dozens of disparate people and clients makes labels, or something similar, indispensable to me.
Going overboard and having a label for everything under the sun would, for most of us, decrease their utility. But in at least some use cases, having many labels definitely is not in and of itself a bad thing.
Disclosure: I work at Google and have been dogfooding this on my personal account for a while.
I draw a distinct line between my work e-mail and my personal e-mail. In my work e-mail I have a lot of rules, filters, automatic labels, and use multiple inboxes. I also need to read and deal with most every e-mail I receive. In this inbox I don't (and frankly wouldn't want to) use the new Gmail inbox. Based on many of the threads here on HN, this is the perspective many have in mind.
However, for my personal inbox it's been a godsend. The automatic labeling is highly accurate, and where it's not you can correct it and it learns/adapts. I can live in my "primary" inbox and only venture into the other tabs (social, updates, promotions, forums) only when I want to. I used priority inbox, and this is an improvement on that, in my opinion.
So while I have a bias here, I've really, really enjoyed having this for at least one of my inboxes. :)
FWIW: I feel exactly the same way. I use this on my personal email, and it hasn't gotten anything wrong in months, while successfully moving a lot of the stuff i only want to tangentially care about to where it belongs.
I find all these new email products (Sparrow, Mailbox, etc.) interesting on a UI/UX level but they're highly irrelevant to me. I always read about how hard it has become to manage one's inbox, but I really don't have a problem with it.
My system is simple: do not sign-up for newsletter or notifications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc.) you won't read, unsubscribe anytime you realize you don't read the ones you receive, delete emails you won't ever need again, archive the ones that are nice to keep around but won't require anything from you anytime soon, and use filters whenever possible.
So in the end, I don't receive that many emails per day. I certainly don't receive any promotions in the mail… that's just asking for trouble.
Right now I have 25 threads in my inbox and the vast majority of them I keep around because they have pictures I want to save in iPhoto but haven't had time to. (I need to find a system for that actually)
> My system is simple: do not sign-up for newsletter
> or notifications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, GitHub,
> etc.) you won't read, unsubscribe anytime you realize
> you don't read the ones you receive, delete emails
> you won't ever need again, archive the ones that are
> nice to keep around but won't require anything from
> you anytime soon, and use filters whenever possible.
If that fulfills 100% of your email wants, awesome!
I've been managing my email fairly well with various hand-rolled filters (which are a pain to update) since the 1990s and I have to say: I still think there's a lot of potential value in what Google is rolling out here.
> unsubscribe anytime you realize
> you don't read the ones you receive,
Again, if it works for you: perfect!
This doesn't work for me.
The reason why is because there are whole classes of emails (notifications, etc) that I do want to read... but only occasionally, and I don't want those classes of emails clogging up my inbox.
Obviously, I can and do manage this myself today with filters/rules/labels/etc. It is totally possible. It is also a pain in the butt sometimes. So I'm eager to see what Google can do here.
How about those newsletters you're happy to read occasionally, but you don't want to interrupt you with notifications etc.?
I've got into the habit of marking all email with "unsubscribe" in it as read by default. I'll still see it when I open up my inbox, but it avoids me ever seeing a notification for something useless.
I'm not a gmail user, but if the following filter is available, I will move:
* Put all newsletters in a tab so I don't see them
* Delete all but the latest five unread of any particular subscription
* Delete anything older than 180 days -- even if I've read it, unless I've 'starred' it.
Can it do that? Coz that would absolutely kill for subscriptions. iTunes does that sort of thing for podcasts. How can newsletters be harder?
Good advice for zero inbox, unfortunately most people aren't this organized and don't think this way and it seems like Google wants Gmail to benefit the most people.
Absolutely. I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, or that it's bad or anything like that. New email interfaces is just one of these things that has never been really useful to me. I tried Mailbox for a bit but it's solving a problem I don't have. This new feature seem as well.
It's almost impossible to /avoid/ getting signed up for a pile of "newsletter" spam. Pretty much everybody that has access to my email address floods me with them.
Any time I get something I don't want I click the unsubscribe link. If the link doesn't work, if there aren't any or if I need to do more than legally necessary (e.g. logging into my account), I click "Report spam" in Gmail.
I don't feel bad about clicking it because I trust Gmail as a whole to be smart enough not to penalize an account globally if I'm the only one reporting it. Plus, when I do it, it's because it's actually spam.
Personally, I view "mark as spam" as a way for me to cast a vote on bad email behavior. No, I do not want to receive the latest news about your product that I bought 5 years ago -- yes, it is spam when you email me about it. It is spam when you email me asking for money just because I attended your group's meetings a few times in college. It is spam when you send me an email that does not render unless I enable HTML. It is spam when you drop my friends' names in an attempt to get me to sign up for your website.
Spam is not just about scams, malware, and crime. It is about the annoying deluge, the fact that I have to open a browser and enable Javascript from 20 different sources when I unsubscribe, and generally about unsolicited, unwanted email trying to get me to do things I am not going to do. Filters, including a spam filter, are what keep my inbox under control.
I used to think that way. Then I started actually using the unsubscribe links and (surprise!) I found that I stopped getting so much junk. I don't really have to hit unsubscribe very much anymore, just whenever my name gets added by some new service I signed up for.
I have a separate email address for this purpose. Anybody I know personally or trust gets my regular email address. Anybody who might sign me up for a newsletter gets my spam email address. I don't get any newsletter spam at my regular address.
Or you can just mark as spam. Most of those "newsletters" and advertisements follow a pattern that is easy for Bayesian filters to recognize (I speak from experience). Your spam filter has been trained enough when it preemptively removes such mail from your inbox.
Out of curiosity, what do you do when you run into an OSS project which requires you to subscribe to a mailing list in order to ask a question? I find the friction of this high enough that I end up staying subscribed forever (and filtering the mail) rather than unsubscribing and possibly having to resubscribe later. I'm glad gmail doesn't have a quota for email bandwidth...
"Out of curiosity, what do you do when you run into an OSS project which requires you to subscribe to a mailing list in order to ask a question?"
One massively helpful resource for this is gmane. You sign up for the mailing list and disable the delivery of mail (usually you must be subscribed to the list to post a message), then use gmane to read messages (hopefully using your favorite NNTP client instead of the gmane website).
I haven't had the problem, but the mailing-lists I've come across are more often than not ran on mailing-list systems that let me pick the emails I want to receive (e.g. Google Groups). I typically go for none or just replies to my own posts. If I want to see what's up I check the site.
But if your filter archives, labels and marks as read the emails, you're fine because your inbox is cleared of them but you still have the ability to check the activity.
I filter to a label and skip inbox. Once in awhile I scan the list (rather lower volume at this point) and see if there is anything I can help with, then I select all for that label and delete.
Looking at my girlfriend's gmail Inbox makes my eyes bleed, it's a mishmash of seemingly irrelevant email, lots of promos or facebook notifications more than half of which is unread. I sometimes find it hard to control myself not to "clean it up". This seems like a perfect addition for her... as for me, I've already setup my filters and am already happy with gmail as is; I don't think this will interfere with that. Seems like a feature designed for the 99% of people who don't frequent HN.
The main difference I can see with labels (at least for power users) is that the mails get filtered automatically by Google in these categories. I believe that most of us here on HN won't see this feature as revolutionary but it might help the less tech-savvy ones.
For quite some time, I've been happy with GMail because I set up a system through which each email is ultimately stored in one of my predefined labels. I wrote an article about it [1]. It's both simple to setup and easy to use. And although I don't receive that many emails, I believe it can scale quite easily.
I have a similar system, but yours does take things a step further. I'll definitely feel like wasting an hour sometime revising my own setup :)
That said, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. If the automatic filtering is done well, it will be a killer feature for normal users.
From glancing over her shoulder, I know my girlfriend has hundreds, if not thousands of unread mails, most of which would probably end up in the promotions tab.
I'm positive this change will make it much easier for her to check her email at a glance.
I actually like the tabs idea, but at the moment I find it useless. If there was an option to show my custom labels (instead of the predefined ones) it would be an awesome addition.
outlook.com has a similar feature, but it seems far less obtrusive and a bit more useful. Having a "Shipping Notifications" category for instance has been really handy. My gut is the outlook.com implementation is more user friendly in general. But I'm happy to see two big email services now competing to add useful features (even if execution might be flawed at times).
So they're giving me sub folders ("tabs") for my inbox folder. How very 1999.
What Gmail is really doing is adding more layers of complexity. Now they have hard wired folders (inbox, sent, etc), labels (aka custom folders), tabs in the inbox, and importance markers (starred / not).
They're making the same mistake that consumed many of Microsoft's email efforts: adding complexity thinking that's how you add 'power controls' and make it easier to sort mail.
I think the key here is not the tabs, its the fact that they know which emails belong in which tabs. Auto labeling. I don't think its hard to imagine that this just get better over time such that our current way of doing this (setting up filters) becomes obsolete.
I would think this simplifies email organization for the average user. Normal people don't use labels extensively and don't customize their inbox. With sane presets for these tabs, Google can give most users an inbox that is organized by default.
The Gmail search is beyond useless to me... Because I have too much stuff saved, and contrary to the web where pagerank provides a good signal, they don't have the same signal for search.
Indeed, that's the purported utility of Gmail: keep around every piece of information, so you never lose track of anything.
Does it work that well for you? How much email do you get on a daily basis?
(I work at a small software startup, SolNovus, that has been exploring this for a while, and for us, it doesn't seem to work that well in practice. Users can't always remember keywords for long-archived messages and have to resort to scanning pages of emails, even when tagged.)
Really, I think the ticket to having an inbox you don't have to organize is not to hide everything beneath the search box, however smart it may be. At some level, you need to incrementally generate queries, because the search will be imperfect. Things like search visualization methods that help incrementally refine queries, tied to more flexible and configurable machine learning, look promising.
I dunno, less than many people I suspect. 100 or so per day (not counting spam)? Search works well enough for me at the moment, though I do confess to tagging things like order confirmations and shipping notifications.
For email you've already read, sure. But it's often nice to have some organization for what you haven't yet read, so you can focus on the email you care most about first.
They can make it possible for me to easily search a trillion pages online from one input box, with a great hit ratio for what I'm actually looking for. But they need to add comical layers of complexity - none of which is new or unique - just to sort my email? It's depressing if that's the best their Gmail team can do.
These 'features' have been done before by other companies and other services, and they didn't solve the sorting problem of email. They're just repeating mistakes other companies made many years ago. There's nothing special about sub folders for an inbox folder, even if you call it a tab.
I would argue that Google needs to think originally again about email, as they did when they first came up with Gmail, and not repeat the poor product choices made by other email products and services.
the same old whining. If you don't like the new features, the blog clearly says you can choose not to use them, they provide backward compatibility.
You say this has been done before, what hasn't. You should live with the features for a while before jumping to immediately trashing them without even having used them.
Nothing is "new or unique" - and nobody wants that either. They want steady improvements without losing familiarity.
I think the fear is that eventually they won't let you turn it off. Google has a habit of doing this type of thing with Gmail (eg the new UI, and the new compose)
Currently, you can't direct searches within nested folders. You either search all messages, or search within one folder/label. So for example, I have e-mails grouped by project, and within big projects there are sub-labels:
If I search in "project1", it doesn't look in any of those sub-folders.
Search also could use a grep-like capability. The "advanced search" options are a bit of a joke, especially coming from a company that cut its teeth on search.
You can search nested labels. If you go into a sub label you should see the search box auto-populate with that label (including the nested on).
For example I have a nested label "Invites" in the label "Calendar" (Calendar/Invites). Searching "label:calendar-invites blah" searches for "blah" inside the nested label.
The issue arises if you know the message you want is somewhere under Calendar, but you're not sure whether it's in Calendar/Invites or Calendar/Rejected or Calendar/DateNotSetYet. As far as I know, it's not possible to search them all at once, just by searching under the tag Calendar.
I agree, you can construct a pretty flexible search system with the existing Gmail implementation. (disclosure: I work at a small startup trying to address email search and archive organization). How many rules do you have set up to achieve your (arguably very reasonable) workflow?
However, to perform a successful search with specific constraints, you must either:
1) Remember a keyword
2) Have a label for the particular constraint you want to use
Our little startup, SolNovus (http://solnovus.com), has been investigating how to make a couple power-user functions like this more accessible. Our priorities are:
1) Fuzzy topic search: make keywords more forgiving
2) Analysis and visualization of email graph: sift through related threads and see the impact of search constraints, represent scale and organization with more than an inbox counter
How about built-in PGP? Even if google stored the private keys by default, it would be a huge step in the direction of getting people to actually use PGP and care about the privacy of their communication.
Sieve support. Why do I need to log into their website (i.e. why do I need to log in a second time, when I already logged in via my mail client) just to set up a server-side filter?
The problem that I have, and that many here seem to have, is that as "advanced" users, we've already built a fully-customized system for ourselves. Like when Dropbox came out, and we all had git/svn/cvs versions of the same thing going back years.
As a result, any changes are inevitably going to break our workflow. Even changes that are better for the common man cannot be better than our customized system.
For example, now it filters social email into the same folder: great, I can ignore it while I'm at work. Except my twitter alerts from my company account. So it breaks.
As another example, you apparently can't customize the tabs, and it disables multiple inbox. I spent a few years coming up with the optimum GTD steup for myself in gmail, and it's broken now.
I think the solution here is really for people like me to use a different email client. Gmail has become the defacto winner, but there's probably a market in making a different client for tech-savvy, very heavy users, with customizable interactions.
I'm just gonna hijack this thread in case any gmail devs are dropping by. the new compose box is a joke - why would you force users to write emails in a small window in the bottom right corner?!
I actually prefer this as it allows me to check other mails while I'm typing. It actually bothers me that replying on a mail still uses the old compose.
I'm not a gmail dev and am not shy of criticizing Google when warranted, but I actually like the compose box. My understanding of the purpose of it is that it allows you to read email in a single browser window while having a compose window open simultaneously. I've found this is helpful when I need to copy/paste addresses or other information from existing emails into a new email. In the past I've previously had to have multiple windows open to do that.
I can see how it is a personal preference issue but it does server a useful purpose as far as I can tell.
I appreciate the ability to browse around my inbox while writing an email, and I suspect that is why the change was made; however, I wish they had left in the ability to compose from the old compose window.
I guess the rationale is that they let you navigate your gmail in the background, flipping back and forth between conversations etc, while composing the new mail.
I just wish the compose box was freely movable. On a very large screen it is indeed awkward to type in the bottom right corner only.
Half of the cribbing about the new compose is unfounded. You see the slanted arrow above the new compose box? Click that. Now you have a whole window to write your message. But the benefits that the new compose gives are quite important for me and many others.
I'm on the fence. I use it and love it. Then I read criticism of it and hate it. Then I read glowing praise of it and love it again. I just can't decide.
> why would you force users to write emails in a small window in the bottom right corner
Seconded. It's actually very painful to write on the bottom right corner; also at times pasting large amount of text in to the box screws its interface. When you've some formatting on the text pasted there, something goes crazy.
I recently quit accessing my primary Gmail account and this is one of the main reasons for it.
Other being the amount of spam that started coming in, in the name of notifications, deals and whatever "my friend has unlocked...".
I also found Gmail forcing a lot of G+ around the header of my inbox, and tonnes of services that I have never opened or would not be interested in. Unable to switch those off.
That said, I do find this label-tab option interesting. Will definitely give it a go.
It's not available to me yet, so I'm not sure how exactly it works.... but their example pic showing "Promotions" as one of the tabs is pretty disheartening. The post here says it's customizable, so I hope that is not mandatory.
It comes off as something being masked as a "feature," when in actuality it is just something that is trying to get me to spend money. It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.
> it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising
Yeah. They used to automatically file non-spam promotional emails into a separate folder where you could safely ignore them, but now they just go into your regular inbox! Money-grabbing so and so's.
(...is what you'd be saying if this feature were being eliminated rather than introduced...)
I'm sorry, but this blog post is suggesting I should have a big shiny button at the top of my email inbox that will show me "Promotions" from Google Offers and Zagat (also owned by Google). That rubs me the wrong way.
> a big shiny button... that will show me "Promotions" from Google Offers and Zagat
No. It files all your emails that it classifies as promotional but non-spam. That won't include Google Offers and Zagat if you're not subscribed to Google Offers or Zagat (for me, it's mostly events & careers newsletters). It's just an auto-categoriser (a new UI for smart labels), it doesn't invent new emails that weren't there before.
Several people in this thread have already explained this. If you don't believe us, go to gmail and switch to the new view - there doesn't seem much point in doing competing close-readings of a short blog post when you can see how it works first hand...
I think you misunderstand what that tab is for. It's not a place for Google advertising; it's a place where promotional emails from any site are automatically sorted into - to keep them separate from other useful email. E.g. a clothing website that sends emails about weekly sales - that'll end up under Promotional.
Ok, I see what you're saying. I guess that pic just comes off as being in poor taste in this post then. Because, in reality, those are not the tabs normal people would set up. So I began to question what the point of the feature was. Is it really to help me organize my inbox? Or is it for Google to show me things they want me to spend money on?
Yes, I would like to keep them separate, but I would not like to have a big prominent link to them at the top of my inbox. See the labels listed in the mobile app screenshot ("Family," "Fun," "School")? I (and most other people, I would think) would much sooner like to have big buttons to those things at the top of my inbox. Not "Promotions."
I think you under-estimate how much people care about these types of e-mails. At work we manage the mailing list for a big restaurant chain. Their "active users" subset of their mailing list makes up about 1/3 of the total, and that 1/3 opens 40% of the promotional e-mails they are sent within 2 days. For a lot of people "Promotions" e-mails both represents a leisure activity (hunting for bargains), and social activities (lunch with colleagues, dinner with friends, evening at the theatre etc.).
> It comes off as something being masked as a "feature," when in actuality it is just something that is trying to get me to spend money.
I dunno. Automatically identifying "Promotions" and sending them off to their own tab seems to be good for helping me avoid dealing with things trying to get me to spend money when I don't want to, just the same as doing the same thing for "Spam" does.
> It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.
Seems to me to be exactly the opposite: having a "Promotions" tab separate from the "Primary" inbox, and especially automatically routing promotional material to that "Promotions" tabl seems to draw the line between the normal content of my inbox and marketing/advertising material more clearly than it is without that feature.
(Which, if you think about it, makes sense from a purely self-interested point of view for Google-as-ad-seller; the easier it is for you to isolate and ignore email-based advertising, the more valuable the web-based advertising that Google sells is.)
I suppose. But the weird aspect here is the prominence of the button. The point of filtering out spam (given the more pleasant name "Promotions" now) is to put it into a place where it won't bother me. Now, they're suggesting I have a big fancy "Promotions" button at the top of my inbox. Why would I want that button there?
> But the weird aspect here is the prominence of the button.
Whichever tabs you choose to have (and if you use the layout, you choose which of the tabs are active) are available as views into your email. This both makes them out-of-the-way when their subject isn't what you want to view, and available when it is.
> The point of filtering out spam (given the more pleasant name "Promotions" now)
Not the same thing: spam (unsolicited commercial email) is still spam. Promotions are for promotions that aren't spam. The reasons why you might not want them in your normal email box are similar, but the probability that you will at some time want to review promotions for more than "did something get here by accident".
If you're saying what I think you're saying, I think you've misunderstood: if this feature is like their current Labs offering, the "Promotions" label is applied to your incoming mail that is best classified as a "Promotion", such as any promotional email from sites you shop at - it's not additional content that Gmail is feeding you. If you don't have any such email, I suspect this category would simply be empty for you.
Wait, are these categories fixed? If so, more proof that gmail is now made for kids: "We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more."
That doesn't remotely begin to describe my inbox, but then again I haven't been in high school for a long time now. Where is the tab for "bills"?
Adults don't get messages from friends? Adults don't get deals and offers from Groupon, LivingSocial, or places they've shopped before? Adults don't get confirmations and receipts for things they purchase from Amazon or for flights they're taking?
These all seem like things people have in their email regardless of age. Your point seems pretty flimsy.
It's a label you create with a filter that has all the email addresses of your providers, so everything skips your Inbox and gets sorted automatically.
Who said GMail has to be designed for engineers? The majority of people have no idea what a filter is and wouldn't be able to figure one out even if you told them where to find it.
As long as the features that I need are there, I don't care what fluff they add on top, so long as I can turn it off. And I can turn this off.
Gmail was originally for the power user, but now it's for the masses. Most people don't customize their tools, so these changes fits in well with their pivot to "casual users".
Maybe this means opportunities will arise for a newer cooler mail service.
I assume this is about getting Google Promotions better airtime in people's inboxes.
One more reason to remove the google flow from your critical path. We always knew there was going to be a time that they needed to please shareholders over users, and that time has come.
This has nothing to do with giving Google Promotions airtime... And everything to do with filtering all promotional material out of the average user's Inbox.
This feature is definitely getting misconstrued. There's been a lab for it for ages (not the new layout, but automatic labelling of these categories) and it works really well. Looks like they're A/B'ing it in (I haven't got the new layout yet), so if you haven't got it yet, enable the smart labels lab and see what you think.
Seems like this is the G+ification of Gmail. All of googles other products (like all the examples shown: g+, zagat, offers, etc) get featured prominently to get more of those sweet, sweet gmail eyeballs.
This is the monetization of gmail. Eyeballs directed towards actual paying or ad-supported services, which is a huge advantage.
"If the new inbox isn't quite your style, you can simply switch off all optional tabs to go back to classic view, or switch to any of your other favorite inbox types."
If this new Gmail feature doesn't suit you, you can TURN IT OFF.
To be fair, that would be an advantage this feature has over ALL THE OTHER OBNOXIOUS FEATURES they've done to mangle the layout over the past N years - features that you could postpone but not avoid. cough New Compose coughcough
But you still stick to it, so it doesn't show up in numbers to them - otherwise they'll change it back to what more people liked - or may be it already is that way?
As a user, I think I'm excited by this, although a lot will depend on the core usability and accuracy -- this is where this kind of technology often founders.
As an entrepreneur, this seems phenomenally relevant, given the relative penetration of GMail among early adopters. The choices that GMail makes can, within limits of what users will tolerate, create new behaviors for its users and eliminate old ones. This can create landgrab opportunities for startups capable of harnessing the new forms of attention and be destructive for startups addicted to the old forms.
I care and they make it worse. It's becoming more and more like Facebook, more chatty instead of with interesting content. Besides the obvious eternal September, which means more users and is a goal of theirs, they discourage long posts and comments by shortening how much you see of it, and making the expand link less visible. I now consciously make sure it breaks mid-sentence so that people know there's more.
Google+ is certainly not a huge success, but they won't step back as far as they can offer it together with other services. Do you imagine Google offering Facebook tab instead?
Hate to be the guy that goes offtopic, but the gender and target bias on the ad bothered me.
So, girls are all about knitting, dates, having their nails painted and buying shoes? I know they just took some trends (knitting and lindy hop), but I found the ad awkwardly worded.
Maybe it's just referring to personal inboxes, or someone that does not know how to keep the inbox clean, or how gmail is supposed to make your day easier, I don't know.
Mine was just enabled (and I use my own domain with Google Apps for Business, so that's a first. Usually I'm the last one to receive beta upgrades).
Here's my first impressions:
1. [Primary] tab was very accurate, right off the bat. It detected all personal and important emails properly. And all social updates went to, well, [Social].
2. [Promotions/Updates]: these two are a bit all over the place. Honestly I don't even understand exactly what they meant by "Promotions", but seems it's "anything that is long, but not personal, and certainly not a simple automatic trigger/trigger". All mixed up. Promos went to Updates, and vice-versa.
3. It also failed to detect several emails from discussion lists and blog posts, that went incorrectly to [Promotions] or [Updates], when it should have gone to [Forums]
4. For now there's no ability to customize the tabs. At all. WYSIWYG. Not even the label. The "+" is just a shortcut to enable/disable one of the 4 additional tabs (besides Primary, that is always visible).
Overall, this is clearly a beta version, so it'll be interesting to see how they improve the functionality over the next releases. I'm sure it'll be a nice addition to most types of users (particularly those that have thousands of emails archived - which is not my case).
I just wished I could customize the labels right away; it's something so small and ridiculously simple to implement, yet it would allow users to make it personally relevant to them. But considering the OP, this should be coming soon.
ps: I can't understand why so many negative comments about an optional feature. At least for now - and likely the next 6-12 months - you'll have the option to simply not use it. And if (when?) they force it down your throat, well, just vote with your money... Oh, wait. Did I just say money?
I just enabled this on my personal account, and my first impression is that the categorization is very useful. Sure, it would be nice to have more customization available, but it looks like you can train it to some degree to tailor it somewhat.
My main complaint is that it adds yet another set of controls on a cluttered and unintuitive interface that has already been changing recently. The tabs go away when you're looking at an individual email, so you can't go straight from a message in one folder to another category. As far as I can tell, when looking at a message and a new one comes in, you can't tell which category it is in. You only see that is there via an "Inbox (1)" in the sidebar.
All in all, I think this is useful, but the overall Gmail UI is still disappointing, and getting busier and less intuitive instead of more helpful.
I currently use the "unread first" inbox type, which puts unread messages at the top of my inbox. It seems that these inbox types are an either/or proposition. I can't have unread messages at the top within this "new" inbox, which is a deal-breaker for me.
If that's the case (I don't have the option to enable the new inbox yet) it's a shame.
A combination of tabbed, filtered content and "unread first" would be a sweet spot as I'd quite fancy being able to prioritise unread email by subject matter without being inundated with those promo emails I'm not quite motivated to set "mark as read" or "junk" filters for.
> In the Gmail for Android 4.0+ and Gmail for iPhone and iPad apps, you'll see your Primary mail when you open the app and you can easily navigate to the other tabs.
And if you don't have Android 4.0+, if you enable this feature you won't be able to see half of your emails - because apparently updating apps for older versions of Android is really hard, despite literally everyone except the people that made Android having no problem doing it whatsoever.
(note to those not on Android: some of Google's own apps only update in lock step with the Android version, so you can only upgrade your Google Talk app by upgrading your whole O/S - which in practice often means buying a new phone)
An unrelated bug that seems to have shipped today: you can reliably deny an iOS user access to the Gmail mobile Web application in Safari and also the iOS Gmail application if you send them an e-mail which (1) ends up in their inbox and (2) has an attached .ics calendar invitation. They'll be forcibly logged out & redirected to the auth screen once they load their inbox in mobile view if their inbox contains a message with an .ics invitation file.
On the flip side, if you see this behavior, you can log in, search for [in:inbox .ics], select all the results, and choose "archive". Neat bug.
A feature that I wish Gmail would copy from Outlook.com is the ability to auto delete emails after a certain time. I have all email tagged with the intelligent Social updates category delete after three days.
I use Gmail and Outlook to manage different email accounts. The Outlook.com inbox has smart categories which are similar to these new Gmail categories/tabs. Instead of tabs across the top like Gmail, Outlook.com has Quick Views on the left hand side which activate the category filter.
Hopefully Gmail will allow you to customize what is filtered by their smart categories like Outlook.com does today.
Seems like a good way to get the Facebook and other social network spam out of people's in boxes, or at least buried under a tab. A subtle way to combat the G+ competitors and spammers.
I don't know about this new Gmail inbox, but what I do know is that Gmail seems to be getting progressive worse with every iteration. Has anyone seen what they've done to Google Talk and Gmail? Basically, every chat message is now saved in Gmail as a sent message. It's so bad now that my entire Sent folder is cluttered and unusable. I had to resort to Conversations view, which I utterly despise, to make things more readable again.
I have a feeling this new Inbox is going to be another iteration of fail.
I use multiple accounts for this kind of filtering, main account, shopping account and throw-away account.
On the one hand I see this as the Office-ification of gmail, the accumulation of useless features that add bulk and complexity but not utility. On the other, this is Google's reaction to the phenomenon of people signing up for multiple things from their email account and getting cluttered as a consequence. Not for me but probably of great use to people with lots of social- and shopping- traffic.
I was really excited about Google Game Services and I've even implemented them into my game, but then I discovered users need a Google+ account (not just a Google account) in order to use high-scores/achievements.
Now I'm considering whether or not to actually publish the version of the game with achievements/high-scores...
aren't games on google+ now being deprecated?
anyway, I think one logic game there had an internal scoreboard (as it was being published from many other locations) and scoreboard copy was also being pushed to g+.
Yes, google+ games are being deprecated. But Google Game Services is something very different, it's an API that makes it easy for game developers to implement achievements, scoreboards and multiplayer. It turns out that your users need a google+ account to get access to these features, thus making them less awesome as I originally thought.
So I have to manually fix gmail's incorrect assumptions about how I want my mail to be filtered rather than manually put my own correct filters in place?
Doesn't seem right for me, but I guess I can see the draw for folks who don't want to deal with setting this stuff up themselves. (Which is probably most folks.)
This (incorrect assumptions leading to frustration) is definitely the most troubling thing to me about automagic solutions. I'm currently working on a project that incorporates this idea of sorting email into contexts (http://solnovus.com, not much info up as of yet), so we've been thinking a lot about this problem specifically.
We are working in user-defined contexts from day one (not all users fit into the 5-context model), but I think incorrect classification is the most important issue to address to minimize user frustration. We are approaching it by treating topic and context membership fuzzily and using graph visualization to aid in traversal of inexact queries.
I couldn't agree with you more: there are serious problems with binary membership and "automatic" filtering.
People who want their email under control already have something similar - for instance, I have filters and labels and folders for Newsletters and offers, one for Family and friends, University and so on.
People who haven't taken control of their inbox yet won't be bothered to do that now.
Loved the music in the video though.
Which is why the tabs have automatic algorithmic categorization - so that all of the people who don't take the time to set up custom filters and labels still get some automatic organization.
I'm excited about this new direction for Gmail. I think their team makes some of the greatest products in the Google ecosystem.
But I have to say, reading this on mobile (Chrome for iOS) is next to impossible. The scrolling is all over the place. Thankfully ihackernews has a "view text" mode that makes this more sane.
I love the new icons! I've been using gMail in fluid (http://fluidapp.com) and had to dig around for a decent icon. As someone who favors flat design (I know, I know, buzz word), I like the simplicity of the new ones they show at the end of the video.
Looks interesting - Will probably try it out, but not sure if I'd stick with it. I try to shoot for 0 inbox at all times - So all my emails are either archived or starred for later; I don't categorize outside of that.
But, that's why they allow an option to disable it :-)
I've turned it on, it instantly categorized my emails perfectly. Just yesterday I was bitching about having to create filter rules for mailing lists and such.
And then today this thing comes up. I'm happy, today is a good day. Unicorns and puppies everywhere!
I'm a heavy user of filters and labels, but I've fallen in love with Gmail's smart labels, which seems to be the early beta version of this.
Creating and managing more and more filters for every single new sender of email gets to be a pain. Every time a new one comes in, you have to go through multiple steps to create one, and then if you unsubscribe, you have to remember to remove the filter, if you don't want your filter list to just get unmanageable.
I find the smart labels do a pretty good job of capturing the main categories I want filtered into particular labels and hidden from my main inbox -- without any extra effort on my part. In my mind, anything that works well and saves me from tedious work is well worth it.
first thing that popped into my head after seeing this: Other Inbox. I've had a similar feature for years from them, just tosses things in the OIB/xyz labels/folders.
Also how will this work with something like Mailbox app for iphone?
I'm willing to guess that GMail is among the top 3 most used products by HN's readership. This is a substantial change in the experience of that product, as well as deployment of what seems to be some pretty nontrivial technology powering that. It's also the kind of feature that will impact any startup that uses email as a communication channel with its customers (to wit: All of them).
If that's not relevant to the HN community I'm not sure what is.
HN almost universally believes in execution over the idea, yet here we are trashing an idea before seeing the execution. It's great that Gmail is trying to innovate and improve the email experience. Maybe this feature won't work out but how about we try it out first?