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.

Comments

Finally

[angus_rg]

So they've put in a working spam filter?

Re:Finally

[Ngarrang]

So they've put in a working spam filter? Whoa! Slow down there, partner! Let's not get ahead of ourselves. First we need to be able to see all of our inbox spam in an orderly fashion before we can begin ignoring it.

is e-mail that deficient?

[yagu]

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.

gmail

[wwmedia]

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

Great, another billboard in my Email

[denis-The-menace]

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.

Re:How about things that matter to users?

[Malc]

BTW - you can write to Yahoo's support about things like date formats. Ask them how to configure it to the standard where you live. They replied to me. If enough people do it, one hopes they'll pay attention and fix it as it will be cheaper than continuing to handle people's emails. Ok, maybe I'm deluded ;)

http://help.yahoo.com/l/ca/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/contactus/

Reality check

[Dan East]

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

What makes them think this is good?

[caution live frogs]

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.

Huh?

[Hognoxious]

Simple thread order or chronological order ignores tons of information that might be available on social networking websites.

They say that like it's a bad thing!