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Yahoo Tries to Improve Your Inbox
Jamie found a story about Yahoo's plans to improve your inbox by incorporating more information into the sorting. Simple thread order or chronological order ignores tons of information that might be available on social networking websites. That way your friends will be more prominently displayed. Automating this could beat the hell out of a hundred lines of procmail recipes.
So they've put in a working spam filter?
http://www.news.com/2100-1038_3-5266019.html
My blog
Is this a solution looking for a problem? The first thing that comes to mind for me around these new features is, how do I explain this to my parents when now, after years of getting the hang of Outlook (and others), they're seeing e-mail messages arranged in some heuristic-based order they don't understand. (And, yeah, I know for now this is Yahoo only, but it always seems that all jump on the bandwagon and add their version of the latest gee-whiz new e-mail behavior.)
Heck, I could see it as throwing me... all of a sudden something that should have been a very important note falls to the bottom of the queue because it wasn't a correspondent in my "linkedin" network.
And, it's a whole new path for spammers to investigate and abuse.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters, even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't likely to be much help. You still have a ton of e-mail to sort out with your own personal heuristics.
With inverted indices, IMO, there's enough power at your fingertips to manage your information your own way. Letting Yahoo sift through the chaff to extract phone numbers, restaurant recommendations, etc., starts to make me nervous... again, with spammers figuring ways to get into your lists.... no thanks.
I know I don't have to use these kinds of new services. But I also know I'm going to get called upon, as always, to explain to family and friends, what's going on with their new mail interactions. At some point these automagic features transcend their explainability. Reminds me a little of Lotus NOTES... a cool and interesting solution religiously doted upon by its followers, but not really a solution to an existing problem but more a solution looking for a problem.
google will never add Sorting into gmail,
it goes against Googles "search not sort" line of taught,
even tho it would be a useful addition to gmail to be able to sort emails
fairplay yahoo, their webmail is already alot more user friendly than gmail
They could start by letting your sort by which emails have attachments and which ones don't without doing a search first.
Threading sounds all right. The rest is tosh. How about they localise properly so I don't have to look at confusing dates in the American format? How hard is that compared with the amount money and time they're throwing at the other crap?
they are going to make POP3 free?
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
Gotta love how Yahoo keeps on adding layers to *prevent* you from getting to your email.
As it is now:
-You login
-you get a customizable billboard that lets you preview (but not touch) your email.
-You must click "Email" to get to your email.
-It then opens a new window or tab with your email to keep the Ads intact and *hopefully* in your view.
I can't wait to see how this *new Feature* will enhance the billboard and make my email that much slower and harder to use.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I have moved over to Gmail from Yahoo, for me that is the best online mail client out there, and with built in pop3/imap support, whatever Yahoo does had better be one heck of a lot better than what Gmail offers in order to even begin competing...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I don't understand what's up with Yahoo!
They tried a replacement of their My Yahoo! page, which seemingly turned out to be an abysmal attempt at copying Sharepoint or some other CMS. It sucks and as long as the "old" My Yahoo! exists, I'm going to stick with it.
If their efforts to "improve" my Inbox turn out to be just as bad, I'm moving on. I already have Google and Hotmail accounts, and am more willing to wade through the spam more than I am to endure a horribly designed and "broken" UI.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I see a number of potential issues with this. There's a very good reason inboxes are normally chronologically sorted - because you are most interested in what is new. I get a daily weather email. I never send email to that address, and it is not part of any social websites. Going by the description of how this new Yahoo system would work, this email would be low priority. With the exception of spam, I really cannot think of any email that I would not want sorted at the top when it first arrives.
The amount of false positives would be extremely high. Potentially important one-of emails would be ranked of less importance than the typically pointless continuous back and forth banter with people at social networking sites. Unrelated emails would be sorted into threads they don't belong unless the system can contextually link emails with unprecedented accuracy.
The article goes into a rather contrived example of how Yahoo figures out that a bunch of emails are all related to choosing a restaurant. It automatically groups all the emails together into a thread by context (By what criteria? Because they were all received in the last week and contain the names of restaurants?), then displays the restaurant on a map (why do I need to see a map to choose what type of food I want to eat?), and finally tries to make the decision for you by looking at your previous reviews of various restaurants. This whole scenario is ludicrous. Just because I liked a restaurant, does that mean it is an appropriate place for some sort of business meeting? What if it is too casual? How can they infer that because a restaurant is my highest ranked, that is the only place I would want to eat in the future?
In the end, I bet this system will amount to nothing more than harvesting your contacts from multiple social sites.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I know more about my relationship with my contacts than any automated program does. I'm a human. Relationships between others are what I am genetically programmed to remember and sort. Computers do this through plain text; humans do it through social context, which extends beyond a single email and into real-world interactions. The sheer number of times I might send email to a specific person has no bearing on how important replies from that contact may be to me. I'm sure most people email coworkers much more often than they email the boss or anyone higher up, but that does not mean I want email from the person who signs my paycheck to be dropped lower in my inbox.
This is why I use IMAP and a small number of simple sorting rules. Messages from X go into box Y. Obvious spam is quarantined. Both are double-checked by me. If Yahoo wants to improve the email experience, they should start by working with others to fix the broken mail protocols that allowed the proliferation of spam in the first place, not find a way to make social networking spam more obvious in my inbox.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yahoo gives your account info to the Communist government. You can do a search (persumably not a Yahoo search) on the fucking web about a case that Yahoo giving the account access and mail contents of a human-right activist to the Party-runned security departments, who later imprisoned him. I'm not feeling like doing the search myself because I don't quite like triggering the Great Firewall this week. I am an Anonymous Coward. (Big-Brother: No you're not.)
As for Google, if only they could implement mail search with regular expressions and more advanced scripting of mail filters.
This is offtopic. Please mod this down.
oops. forgot to check the "post anonymously" box. i'm shot!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
One is threaded conversations like GMail offers. I found that very useful.
The second is IMAP, so I can sync my email and calendar to my phone on the fly.
That's all that's left. I already prefer it to Gmail by far, if they add that in, I won't even think Gmail can catch up.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
To anyone complaining about what all Yahoo doesn't have or can't do and whatever other complaints you have about Gmail. Honestly, they a FREE services ... unless you have recently forgotten. Quit bitching. Go buy a domain, server space and set up your own mail server if you really are that unhappy. Seriously.
If there's one suggestion I have for yahoo to improve their email, it's to leave their users the hell alone! I tried to switch to their new beta mail format (the outlookish one), and was immediately greeted by some lame popup which stole focus. It had a little cartoon guy asking me to take a minute so he can show me some cool new features of the new yahoo mail. It said something ridiculous like, "This will be quick, promise!" There was no way to kill the first intro box without another little popup coming up which started talking about new features.
I switched back to the old yahoo mail format as quickly as I could. I never, ever, ever want to be forced to go through a stupid little cutesy tutorial on "new features". If I want to see some new features I will explore later, when I choose to.
Not gonna happen.
Why? They don't bring in more revenu to Yahoo.
Now if you could figure out how to make money from such a thing...
(Sad how Yahoo is so short-sighted)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
While I am just rolling my eyes at his attempt to amateurly guess at legal consequences, I am in shock as to how he doesn't see the obvious contradiction in his logic. This guy's whole theory of it being unlikely that anybody would steal his wi-fi is completely at odds with his theory that if somebody does actually do so he can just claim it was open and thus 'not him.' Right.
I'm guessing this is not connected with helping the user. Maybe they want to organize your email messages so that they can calculate the conversations more efficiently and serve ads that are more effective.
Yahoo played so many tricks that I learned to stay away from it; I haven't seen Yahoo in years.
Now I just visited the Yahoo web site. As I write this it says, "Pulse - What Yahoos Are Into". That's typical of Yahoo's respect for it's customers. A "yahoo" is "an uncultivated or boorish person".
You have to set up filters, but that's how I like it. I have about 20 labels and filters. Expected emails (e.g. from bank) get labeled and moved away from the inbox. That way the emails in Inbox are the most important ones. I really like this feature in Gmail. Much better than some other automatic way of sorting (which besides chronological I don't see any other obvious yet useful way).
Right now I use Outlook at work, and Thunderbird or Evolution at home (depending on whether I'm on my XP or Linux install) - with these I have my mail sorted by date, so that any mail that comes in is right at the top, I then read that mail. If I ever need to go back to that mail, if I remember when it came in I scroll down to the date and there it is, if I don't I type something in the search box at the top and it nine out of ten times finds it almost instantly. On the rare occasion that it doesn't find it I click the sort option and change it to 'From' and scroll down to whoever sent me the mail, et voila, there's the mail. Remind me why Yahoo need to reinvent how I sort my mail again?
"... upgrading to Vista." Grammatical error: Should be "downgrading".
[quote]One is threaded conversations like GMail offers[/quote]
Meh... personally, that irritates the crap out of me, because I tend to organize chronologically and spatially... essentially, with a traditional "newest message at the top" format, I can find things by knowing "oh, the one I'm looking for is older than this one" and remembering which messages were close to one another in the list. Threads work for message boards, usenet (if configured right) and slashdot, but only if you can show it graphically . Showing me just the most recent message does me no good, and I should have the option to not use "conversations".
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
...send me dirty jokes and sports trivia. My boss, realtor, financial manager on the other hand...
...they put this also in the "classic" mail interface, not the new one, which is just crap.
.sig: No such file or directory
If Yahoo really wants to improve my email experience, then they can get rid of the annoying, slow-loading, browser-error-causing ad graphics all over the place. Hello! I'm a paying user! Remember that money I send you every month for my AT&T Yahoo DSL service??
One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duck tape to make them stop. ~G.M. Weilacher
all i ever wanted was a decent spam filter.
Does this mean yahoo will now sort stuff myspace way (whatever that is) instead of "the way it works"?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I had a Yahoo premium account for 2 years and dropped it this year when I discovered Gmail lets you POP for free. Plus they give you little over 6 GB free. I mean please Yahoo I'm not going to pay $20 just so I have the luxury of backing up my email. Plus Gmail's ads are really minimal. Yahoo's ads are all up in your face. Gmail FTW!
Same for me. Yahoo is now my throwaway account for useless website registrations, and even then I'm so disgusted by the amount of spam when I log in that, out of pity, I try to mark a little of it before logging out. I don't know if they're cross-referencing spam reports from different users, though.
How is Yahoo improving my inbox when I don't have a yahoo account?
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Except that I do it for ALL email. So anything that ends up in my Inbox is either spam, or something I haven't made a filter for yet.
Everything else is filed under Friends, Family, or a mailing list label, like BugTraq.
Makes life a LOT easier. You can select all + mark as read for the things you don't bother to read, so you still know when you have new mail.
And I've yet to see any actual use for nested folders. If I had, I'd create a label (or multiple labels) for them. An email can have as many labels on it as you want, after all. There's no need to be inflexible in how you think of things, but I guess a lot of people are. For me, tags are strictly better than folders in every way, because there's nothing I can't find a way to do with labels, but there are plenty of things I can't duplicate with folders.
...By saving my mail.
I tried to reactivate an old forum account last night. I knew that I had a long history of e-mail correspondence with the administrator, and all I had to do was search for the guy's name in my Yahoo mail history and it would pop up. The trouble was, the earliest e-mail Yahoo search was able to produce was from November of 2004. That's a little over 3 years ago. Most of the important correspondence was before November of 2004, and I was unable to use my own e-mail records (which had apparently been erased) to get my forum account information.
I can't understand for the life of me why in the day of 1TB hard-drives Yahoo can't keep e-mail records for more than 3 years. There are many very real circumstances where people need to reach back 4,5 maybe even 10 years in their e-mail records. Yahoo is cutting more and more corners and inserting more and more ads.
Does anyone know how long Gmail keeps e-mail records? I've been having more and more reason to switch from Yahoo to Gmail, and this may be the last straw for me.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
What they could do to improve the overall thing instead is to make it compatible with opera(most of the service works since opera 9.5alpha, but not all features). And they could also stop sending me invitations to their beta program that they actually don't offer in my area, as they explicitely tell me once i've made the move to update. I get this invitation everytime i sign in. Of course, there's also gmail, hehe so long yahoo!
> google will never add Sorting into gmail
When will Gmail add ONE simple thing/sort to its service: expiry.
"incoming mail can be set to expire instead of just plain deletion," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus .
Great for my Inbox. To wit, if it's overflowing with months-old messages, then delete/expire messages at my command.
So GMail already has threading. And it also has IMAP.
What does Yahoo offer you that GMail is lacking? Serious question.
Please tell me how I delete 1000 messages in a folder without going through several pages of messages?
And why if I am telling you something is not working (like in Yahoo hiding messages which are reachable by clicking Next once reading one) I am told everything is OK like if I was a rabid lunatic?
I asked to talk to somebody that understood how email works just to be told more nonsense from a poorly paid tech support reading a script.
I needed to talk to the circus's animal trainer but they kept sending me with the monkey, whose only grace is to say no.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What I miss from Yahoo mail is a whitelist.