GMail Introduces Priority Inbox

jason-za writes with this quote from a Google announcement: "People tell us all that time that they're getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean — here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day — mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that's often not important. It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we're happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta) — an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail."

Comments

How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

"It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply"

How about putting "For action", "For reply", or "For your information" in the subject lines of e-mails?

It would also be a good thing to put a 1-line summary of the email, followed up with a Details section.

Of course, this only works from the perspective of the sender, but if you do this when sending e-mails out to people, they might pick up on it.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Abstrackt]

It would also be a good thing to put a 1-line summary of the email, followed up with a Details section.

Isn't that what the subject line and message body are supposed to be for?

I appreciate that Google is trying to idiot-proof email but it'd probably be a simpler task to train people using almost your exact phrasing: the subject line is a one line summary of the email and the body is the details section.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[TheRaven64]

Ideally, a mail client should track how often someone uses the 'high importance' flag. Someone where I used to work used it for every single mail that she sent to mailing lists, and they were never important. In contrast, my editor only uses it for stuff that I actually need to read and respond to urgently, maybe 1% of emails I get from him. A mail client could easily learn that the first person always abuses the flag, while the second person uses it appropriately, and only flag emails from him.

It could also easily learn which senders always get immediate replies, while others get replies after a few days. Presumably the Google system is using the same sort of learning algorithms that they use for spam, but with this kind of thing as input rather.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[DIplomatic]

I appreciate that Google is trying to idiot-proof email but it'd probably be a simpler task to train people...

Are you serious? I'd take a complex sort algorithm over trusting the people who email me in a heartbeat! I've been begging a client of mine to stop marking his emails urgent for half a decade. Give it up man! Flagging your emails and using a lot of exclamation marks does not make you important!

Re:How about good subject lines?

[bennomatic]

Most people are idiots about email. Two of my favorite people in the world are brilliant in so many ways, but they're idiots about email.

One of these people doesn't know how to use an address book or type in an email address unless absolutely necessary, so all emails she sends are responses to old emails. So if I want to find an email that she sent last week, it might be in a thread that started in 2006. Or 2008. She's not consistent about which ones she responds to.

The other one always puts "Hey Ben" in the subject. Doesn't matter what it's about; the subject is always, "Hey Ben". even when I change the subject line on response, he'll change it right back to "Hey Ben" when it's his turn.

I've tried to explain the benefits of good subjects to both of them, but they give me that 10,000 mile stare like I'm speaking Klingon or something.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Bertie]

...And the remaining proportion seems to be sent by the sort of people who think that sending every email as Highest priority will make people pay more attention to them, as opposed to write them off as jumped-up blowhards with no sense of perspective.

arms race

[corbettw]

So now only emails meeting a certain priority will make it to the top of the list. How long until people figure out how to make their emails have higher priority and start abusing that power, leading the same problem Google just solved? Better to rely on a combination of filters to sort your mail for you as it comes in than try to trust some automated system (that can be gamed by others) to do it for you.

Re:arms race

[X_Bones]

uh, it's not like they're just examining the X-Priority: OMG CRITICAL header field or anything here. TFA says it's based in part on the people who you email the most, and the emails which you choose to reply to. I imagine it'll work about as well as Gmail's spam filtering (i.e., pretty damn good in my experience).

Re:arms race

[natehoy]

And let this be a lesson for metamoderating-by-reply: ratings change. :)

Spam detection is much easier

[saibot834]

The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you? Filtering important emails sounds much more difficult than filtering the usual spam: One one hand, spam usually comes in bulk; it is distributed to millions of addresses (which provides a way of detecting it) with little variety in regards to content. On the other hand, spam messages do have much more in common (because there are few authors with a handful of different content types) than "important mail", which is created by many different people with a huge variety in regards to content.

Don't they already have a tool for this?

[stagg]

I thought that's what filters were for. Gmail is getting a bit cluttered with features. The elegance of it was always one of the big wins for me. I'd rather have one simple, configurable feature that allows met do many things than a hundred buttons on my screen. Filters and tags already pretty much covered this.

Re:Don't they already have a tool for this?

[DragonWriter]

I thought that's what filters were for.

No, filters are for categorizing mail by the criteria you have thought through and told Gmail about.

Priority Inbox is an option that, when you use it, tells Google you want it to do best-guess prioritization automatically, without you telling it any more than "do your thing".

Priority Inbox will probably be most useful for people who don't want the bother of defining filters, though people who do have explicit filtering rules that are used to categorize mail may also find it useful for prioritizing the stuff that's left in the inbox.

Very useful

[D H NG]

I've been using this for about 6 months and it's very useful. Mail from people I read and reply to more often usually percolate to the top. Sometimes unimportant mail are marked as "important" but I can downgrade them. Just keep an eye on the "Everything else" pile once in a while, sometimes important mail are mislabeled.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[DragonWriter]

It is also an absolute non-problem.

I suspect that Google has a lot better handle on their users needs than you do in this area. Your proposed alternative is to get all senders in the world to change their behavior to fit the receiver's preferences. Google's new optional tool allows receivers using GMail a way of getting a reasonable first-cut view of message priority that is based on the receivers treatment of past messages without senders changing behavior. Google's tool, it seems, is more likely to work in the real word.

Re:So...

[Ionized]

don't get all self righteous, gmail has had filters forever.

the priority inbox is like the opposite of spam filtering. that is to say, it works AUTOMATICALLY. some people can't be assed to set up rules and filters and such, but this will do all the work for them.

so yes, it IS pretty amazing new technology. smartass.

Re:Threading

[VJ42]

Finding items around by date (especially when you only know the approximate date)

That's easy, in the search box type: "from:abc@example.com after:YYYY/MM/DD before:YYYY/MM/DD" (quotes not included) you can also use it with a whole bunch of other search options: http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et_find_mail.htm - you certainly shouldn't 'lose' an email from gmail's archive if you know anything at all about it - Google is good at search.