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

Today I'm proud to announce

[Anonymous Coward]

Priority Post (beta)

Re:Today I'm proud to announce

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily for you it's still in beta, 'cause I seem to have found a bug...

Re:Today I'm proud to announce

[kabloom]

Your priority post even comes pre-expanded for our viewing convenience.

Thank god

[elrous0]

Just glad to see /. is back up. I was having serious geek withdrawal there for a while.

Re:Thank god

[Abstrackt]

Just glad to see /. is back up. I was having serious geek withdrawal there for a while.

You mean you don't have a local mirror?

Re:Thank god

[Trevelyan]

What was up with it?

It would start to load, you'd get some content and then *bam* "Connection reset'.

For me I got the first article (the Blackbox one), a banner and/or menu or two, and the odd image. No CSS.

Re:Thank god

[elrous0]

Only the one in my bathroom.

Re:Thank god

[Abstrackt]

Only the one in my bathroom.

Ah, you're a TiSP subscriber too eh? ;)

Re:Thank god

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but faking your own kdawson posts while waiting for the main site to come back up is sort of tedious, not to mention mind warping.

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?

[Darkness404]

...Well, really out of all of your e-mail how much of it is actually sent by an actual, thinking person. The majority of my e-mail goes as follows:

Reminder that anyone who wants to go to the company picnic can call XXX-XXXX

Please conserve paper

Hi, I saw this funny video of a cat running into a wall

Did you know that sometimes doctors are wrong and people can live longer then their doctor tells them they can?

Most of the junk e-mail is sent by:

A) Mass-emailers
B) Clueless computer users
and not someone who thinks before they hit send.

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?

[N1AK]

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

Because it would work about as well as the high importance flag in outlook. From experience it seems clear the sender of emails isn't the right person to decide importance etc for the receiver. There is no advantage to sorting my email by someone else's estimate of importance.

I'm a little surprised that this kind of feature has been so long coming. If it works, it will be a big help to people who process there email in fixed time slots (many methods designed to improve effectiveness suggest this). I've taken to processing my personal email in two 15 min chunks daily. The first thing I do is prioritise, so if this is effective it'll save me more time.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[swarsron]

We did already lose the TOFU war. There is no way people would ever do this since it means more work for them.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

>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.

I was going to try to rebut you, but now that I think about it, it's not a bad idea. To my mind, the subject was supposed to be a noun or noun phrase.

I think I might try putting 1 line summaries in the subject for a week or so.

Actually, maybe e-mail clients can help by saying "Summary" instead of "Subject".

Re:How about good subject lines?

[jgagnon]

The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short. A LOT of people read email on tiny screens these days so long subjects just make life difficult. Really short subjects don't give enough information about what the email is truly about, so people will arbitrarily read or not-read it based on incomplete information -- which is neither good for the sender nor the receiver.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[John Hasler]

> ...it'd probably be a simpler task to train people...

No. Training people is a hopeless task.

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?

[jazman_777]

Hi, I saw this funny video of a cat running into a wall

Link, please?

Re:How about good subject lines?

[xaxa]

I use lots of filters:
* 95% of opt-in advertising mail goes into the "Boring ads" folder, and is never read. If I'm booking a flight I'll look at some recent emails from the airlines I've used before, in case they've sent me a discount code. The other 5% goes in the "Ads" folder -- stuff I usually read, like emails from my favourite nightclub saying what's on this weekend.
* Anything from my parents goes into a folder, they email me far too much.
* Newsletters (from charities, alumni groups, etc) go in a folder, I read them if I'm sufficiently bored.
* Automated notifications go in a folder. (e.g. Slashdot "A reply has been posted" mails).
This is especially useful since I bought an Android phone, since I don't get a "Ping!" every time someone tells me I can get a cheap train ticket to visit grandma.

This new feature sounds like it would do lots of this automatically, which lots of people will probably find very useful.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Darkness404]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlXVQXiu3tk

And yes a coworker did just send me that today.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[jgagnon]

Someone mod this +6 865 877 562 (the approximate world population).

Re:How about good subject lines?

[BrokenHalo]

The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.

Another trick is to be careful of to whom you give your most "important" email addresses. In my case, I now have just five addresses, allocated to different fields of activity, so they are easily kept sorted. Then just use Thunderbird (or Apple's Mail client, or whatever takes your fancy) to pull mail from all of those addresses with the click of a single button.

Spreading your mail thus over several inboxes is an easy way of sorting stuff into approximate categories that are easy to scan with nothing more awesome than the power of the naked human eyeball.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Shoe Puppet]

What if pretty much all mail from a person is in fact important?

Re:How about good subject lines?

[BrokenHalo]

Far out. If I had an Android phone, I wouldn't be too keen to let crap like newsletters or advertising swallow up my limited traffic allowance. I would only use it for my lower-traffic inboxes.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Rutefoot]

16 Labels on my personal email and about a dozen filters

75+ labels on my work email and about 3 dozen filters

Frankly, I'm going to be pissed if I did all that work for nothing

Re:How about good subject lines?

[BrokenHalo]

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.

That sounds like a candidate for a suitable (fake) "bounce" message. Maybe something like this...

"Attention Will Robinson! Your email has been intercepted by a lameness filter. Please try supplying an apposite subject line."

Re:How about good subject lines?

[TheRaven64]

See the second paragraph of the post that you replied to...

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

>. even when I change the subject line on response, he'll change it right back to "Hey Ben" when it's his turn.

Yeah, I do that trick, too.

You get an e-mail that says "server" or something, and in the reply you change to something meaningful so you can search on it later.

Sad to see it's not working for you.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

The problem with multiple e-mail addresses is that you have to check 5 different accounts under the root in your email client.

Solution: do a search for recent email (where date is less than 3 days or so from today), and save it as a "saved search". You can select what folders the search operates on (and thus which email accounts you're pulling in) under Properties for the saved search.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[cayenne8]

"I've taken to processing my personal email in two 15 min chunks daily. "

Wow..interesting.

I mean...I get a good bit of mail all day, every day...but I pretty much process it as it comes in, quick answer to things important...trash for things that are not important.

And I monitor work email and personal gmail all day long....

I guess some people for some reason, see email as a bother/distraction (I've got one friend this way in particular), but I don't generally see it that way. I find it a nice break from the job thought mode frankly.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[viperblades]

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

Where do you live and work so I can move to a place where people can actually be trained to do things. Do people also follow the traffic laws where you live too?

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Obsi]

Quoth my procmailrc: :0:
X-Priority: 1 (Highest) /dev/null

Re:How about good subject lines?

[aaandre]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

One of the more common subject lines I get in an organization where email is the primary means of communication.

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.

You'd think. I usually just add a subject to the email when it comes my way but "training people"... not that easy.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Bertie]

I'll decide what I do as a result of emails I receive, thanks. I won't appreciate other people presuming to take that decision for me.

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.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[TooMuchToDo]

Cool story bro time.

11 years ago, when I started in IT, my first job was a sysadmin intern at a web development shop with 16 people. One of the projects I got to work on was their project management/task tracking system we built in Coldfusion (I know, right? I was young and dumb). We had two account managers, one who was understanding, competent, and awesome. The other? Aggressive, pushy, and demanding. Everything was an emergency. Course of action? The developers wrote an algorithm for task tracking based on on the client, the type of task, and so forth. One of the variables was of course which account manager submitted the request. Guess which account manager had their tasks weighted as a higher priority?

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Bryansix]

I actually banned an email address from our entire company network because the user would not stop marking every single email as "Urgent"! The funny thing was she was pissed and tried to email the CEO. The email just went into quarantine where I read it, laughed a lot, and then trashed it.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Quirkz]

The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.

Valuable truth. Unfortunately most of the people I know use the subject line of "whatever the subject of the last email from you in my inbox was" whether or not it has anything to do with the current topic.

Of course my favorite was an old boss who simply put my name in the subject line of every email he ever sent to me. Just try searching through a year's worth of messages all titled with your name, in search of the one that has the attachment image (also poorly named) that you need now for some strange reason.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Myopic]

Huh. Well, I always thought the subject line was for the subject of the email. Subjects are not the same as summaries. A summary line sounds like a good idea to me, but again, any solution that relies on other people is sure to fail, which is why we pursue solutions that we ourselves can implement.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[GreyWolf3000]

Another pro tip -- write the email itself first, then the subject afterwards. Easier to summarize what you've already written.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[LBt1st]

I simply have Thunderbird filter my mail into different folders. When all your subscriptions are in one folder, ebay stuff in another, cronjobs, crap from your girlfriend, etc are all in their own folder, it becomes easy to get at the important stuff when you need to.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Will.Woodhull]

The key phrase being supposed to be for.

My conception of what is important is very different from what many of those who send me emails consider important. And my assessment of the subject line is highly dependent on the context provided by the from and to lines.

Maybe Google's approach will have some value for me. Expecting that some magical training will get everyone else to use subject lines the way that I think they should be used would be a foolish notion. of course YMMV.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[bennomatic]

Even "server" would be great, assuming the email is about a server. But no, it's always, "Hey, Ben".

I even try to make it clear what I'm doing, i.e. "Subject: MyGoodBuddysBusiness.com Server (was: Hey, Ben)", but even that doesn't cut it.

sigh.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[bennomatic]

LOL. I'll even wave my arms around like the Robinsons' robot did.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[mattack2]

The problem with multiple e-mail addresses is that you have to check 5 different accounts under the root in your email client.

If by "check", you mean the client has to gather email from multiple servers.. then yes..

If by "check", you mean that the USER has to manually switch between email accounts.. then no.. at least not with some email clients. That is, those that have "universal INBOXes". BTW, I personally don't use such a client, but know they exist.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[mattack2]

Most people are idiots about email.

Like top-posting.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[I_M_Noman]

>No. Training people is a hopeless task.

You've never sat through one of my classes, then.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[JackieBrown]

The worst are those who type the whole email in the subject line.

From: Boss
To: Team
Subject: Who wants to work on this project? Respond ASAP or I will assign it to everyone
Body: (long signature to look important)

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

Yeah, sorry I wasn't clear on that: many (most?) email programs allow you to put all incoming mail from multiple accounts into a single inbox.

Some/many also allow different folders for different accounts. Or you might have set up a rule to put, e.g., Oracle Technology Network emails in one folder, MS Technet in another, server load average notifications in another.

But if you have such a rule set up, there's no one single place you can go to for "today's emails". Thunderbird's saved searches is the only solution I've found to that, and it's the reason I don't use Outlook or Evolution.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

>I mean...I get a good bit of mail all day, every day...but I pretty much process it as it comes in, quick answer to things important...trash for things that are not important.

Interesting.

How do you deal with the situation where someone's asking you for a definitive answer on X (whether X is what's the best CMS for our company, does app Y support blah, etc.)? Once you reply in email, it's like you've given it in writing.

And answering "I don't know, I'll find out" for every email seems redundant--you could probably write a script to do that.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[RivenAleem]

I trick people into opening emails with the subject line.

"FW: FW: FW: Paris Hilton Embarrassing Photo (NSFW)" will ensure that everyone reads important memos.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

Yeah.

>>Most people are idiots about email.

>Like top-posting.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[SnowZero]

I don't see the problem with that.

Most people are idiots about email.

Like top-posting.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

The thing is, you can always do what you want.

It's about what other people are requesting you to do.

If they're asking you to do something (like hold a seminar, fix a network switch, whatever), then it's for your action.

If they're asking you something on which your input is vital for their report or whatever, it's for your reply.

If you're not immediately in the chain for that e-mail and you're just being given a carbon (courtesy) copy, it's for your information. Say, one of your minions decided to use RoR for their 20% project to graph flying pigs.

You can still give a reply if you want, it's just that they're not requesting it. On the other hand, if they specifically request a reply, and you don't answer, that seems sort of bad.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Compaqt]

>Please conserve paper

That's just begging for a response of "Please conserve electrons", followed by a half-cocked explanation of the Law Conservation of Mass and Energy, and the limited electrons available for sending messages over the network.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[gfreeman]

No, the worst are those who do not put a subject line at all.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[gfreeman]

About 20% of my work emails are written over a period of time, and end up in the Drafts folder. I *know* the summary of what I want to say already, and that becomes the subject. Actually getting that out into an email in such a way that it becomes unambiguous to anyone who'd read the email - that's the art of writing good emails. If you have no idea what the summary is going to be yet, why are you writing the email in the first place?

Re:How about good subject lines?

[gfreeman]

I get 'high importance' flagged emails from servers, and never reply to those. In fact they get deleted after the issue has been fixed.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[gfreeman]

How do you deal with the situation where someone's asking you for a definitive answer on X (whether X is what's the best CMS for our company, does app Y support blah, etc.)?

I don't know, I'll find out

Re:How about good subject lines?

[True ChAoS]

Problem is they'll probably reply with "Bye Ben" in the subject line...

Re:How about good subject lines?

[GreyWolf3000]

Sometimes I use longer emails to communicate more comprehensive thoughts that I don't get around to organizing until I write the email. The act of writing the email is what binds the thoughts together in my head. If I write a bad subject line, I'll be shoehorning all of the thoughts somewhere they should not have been going in the first place.

I guess it's a difference in thought process.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[Overzeetop]

You're looking for a "cry wolf" flag that automatically gets set in your address book based on a certain threshold. I like it.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[rchandraonline]

supposed to be for, yes. Used that way? not so much.

It's gotten so bad that anything that doesn't have a subject line, has "(no subject)" as the subject line (as some mailers do), or one word subject lines go straight away into a file called "rejects" which doesn't get looked at unless or until absolutely everything else is taken care of.

I too share frustration expressed by others, in that you'll regularly see "question for you" (instead of, ohidunno, "question about that tool you used last I saw you"), or "calendar reminder" (about what???), again, by people who are often well-meaning but are just close to clueless. The same holds true, BTW, for Microsoft and, among other things, their monthly updates. After all, please...how tough can it be, instead of writing "security update" followed by some obscure knowledgebase reference, to write "security update addressing lack of BITS service parameter validation" or whatever it happens to be? Oh, right, we are Gates of Borg (well, these days, Ballmer of Borg, but the graphic doesn't look that way), you will be assimilated--they're drones instead of intelligent people over there.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[rchandraonline]

Give it up man! Flagging your emails and using a lot of exclamation marks does not make you important!

That's what inbound processing (Outlook Inbox Assistant for example) is all about.

In my previous job, a few people got exceptions up front, such as my supervisors (and they were very judicious about flags and importances and such; I was fortunate). Everyone else got all flags and importances reset to "normal." I realized early on in this all the machinery for this (headers and such) was at the whim of the sender, and usually had absolutely nothing to do with my reality. After all, sure, it's a big pain point for you, but how the heck are you suppoed to know all of what's happening in the rest of my world? Oh, yeah, you're my supervisor, so you do know, so that's one big reason you get excepted.

Re:How about good subject lines?

[jesset77]

Someone mod this +6 865 877 562

Your call cannot be completed as dialed, please check your country code and dial again. Message I D ten T.

Yo Dawg

[ultraexactzz]

I keep thinking back to our good friend Xibit when I read this article. Yo Dawg, I know you like Gmail, so I got you an inbox for your inbox, so you can read mail while you read mail.

Re:Yo Dawg

[sconeu]

Pimp my Inbox?

Re:Yo Dawg

[radix07]

I think Google is gonna try to cram as much stuff as possible into Gmail. Soon you will actually be able to Gmail in your Gmail while you Gmail...

Re:Yo Dawg

[cayenne8]

"I think Google is gonna try to cram as much stuff as possible into Gmail. Soon you will actually be able to Gmail in your Gmail while you Gmail..."

Yeah..and that kinda blows...especially with them doing away with the 'classic' gmail front end soon.

I have an old iBook G3, which I keep on the nightstand...nice for doing simple email, etc...

However, gmail is getting too slow with all the new functionality, and all.

I guess I could set up apple mail to grab it as imap, but was just handy to have a web browser tab for gmail, and other tabs up at the same time.

I really wish they'd keep things separate..email is email, chat is chat....etc.

I prefer to choose the best of a component type, rather than something trying to do everything at once...which generally doesn't do any of the things that well.

jason-za wrote that? Really?

[ojintoad]

Based on his website he doesn't sound like a Gmail engineer but more of a "MSc student in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town where [he does] research how to scale fuzzy crowds on the GPU with CUDA."

I feel like it's possible that Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer for Google, wrote that, or someone who represents Doug Aberdeen. It's more likely jason-za just copied and pasted that.

I really hate writing such snide remarks but come on slashdot editors, how long would it have taken to correctly attribute this stuff...

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

[bunratty]

The solution is obvious... Demand email neutrality now!

Re:arms race

[WrongSizeGlass]

How long before we see Google applying for a patent for "E-mail delivery and presentation based on priorities other than '!High!', 'Normal' and 'Low'"??

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

[Nimey]

It's supposed to learn from your email-reading habits, so it's something like Thunderbird's Bayesian spamfilter, i.e. gaming this would be difficult.

Re:arms race

[Moridin42]

How is it an arms race? They didn't make it so that these criteria are what makes email important to everybody. It learns whats important to each user, individually. Thats a much harder target.

If you read LKML messages every time, they'll start getting marked important. If i just look now and then, it won't be so marked in my inbox. You can help it learn by flagging a message important, or one that was incorrectly flagged important you can tag as unimportant. You can set up filters.

Unlike a search engine, what keyword, phrases, or grammatical construction the sender uses won't flag the message as important when the criteria is based on the receiver's behavior.

Re:arms race

[esocid]

I tried it out this morning when I saw that new tab. It doesn't automatically say "Hey, it seems that you apparently have a small penis, so we'll give priority to all these peen enlarger emails." It gives a little prompt at first saying, "Are these emails important, and are these less important?" and you modify it if you need to. Again, in your inbox you can select a message and promote it, or demote it.

It's actually made quite a difference to my inbox so far. I can now readily distinguish between my "read now" emails, and my "read later or ignore" emails.

But I digress from my point. RTFA next time.

Re:arms race

[chichilalescu]

well, it's the same as with spam. When spam filters became standard, people invented chain letters. Now they'll just turn up the kitty cuteness to 11.
but seriously now, they just realized that a lot of people have no idea they can sort their e-mail in any way, or that they can use folders; so they're just doing that for them, with a filter that learns.

Re:arms race

[toppavak]

This will be fairly difficult. If I understand how they're implementing this correctly the decision of priority will not be based purely on content but rather on what content corresponds strongly with whether or not the user reads it quickly / other similar measures of importance. SEO is possible because it relies on generating content that allows a website moving up in rankings rather than also looking at user behavior connected to those websites (which links are clicked on most often for a given search, for example).

Re:arms race

[jgagnon]

It is also based on which ones you READ. So if you read all of those NO-REPLY emails you get then it will still consider them more important than other ones you do not read. If you are one of those people that read everything you get (or at least mark everything you receive as read) then you might be in trouble. And I'm sure this will remain an optional feature for quite some time.

Re:arms race

[tlhIngan]

well, it's the same as with spam. When spam filters became standard, people invented chain letters. Now they'll just turn up the kitty cuteness to 11.
but seriously now, they just realized that a lot of people have no idea they can sort their e-mail in any way, or that they can use folders; so they're just doing that for them, with a filter that learns.

Actually, chain letters have existed long before spam filters - I think the rise of the bayesian filters killed the last off because I remember getting maybe one or two a month in the mid 90's. (I just forwarded them to every From: address I saw - there was usually enough addresses down the forward chain of those gullible).

As for folders or labels - that relies on people being dilligent and using them. Labels are great because you can tag emails multiple times, but I personally don't use them beyond an initial sort of "mailing list" "interesting notes to myself" "registration codes" and the like. I'm not disciplined enough to keep my life sorted into neat little boxes, so most of my email is in the inbox. I do have a nice index memory so I can generally recall if something sounds familiar and approximately when, to which I can just search and find it. It's only good for maybe the past month or so, but that usually suffices since I rarely have to search archives.

Re:arms race

[Silentknyght]

Wait, a -1 Troll and not a +1 Funny for this obvious sarcasm and reference to net neutrality? Let this be a lesson for safe forum activity: always wear your /sarcasm tag.

Re:arms race

[adisakp]

Well, the priority is based on people you e-mail most often. So the only way for that to happen is for someone to hack into your Google contacts and impersonate them (or use your contacts and impersonate you when sending spam to your friends). Of course, given the variety of viruses, trojans, worms and bots on the average computers nowdays, I'm willing to bet that already happens quite often in today's world even before this change with g-mail.

Re:arms race

[natehoy]

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

Re:arms race

[grumpyman]

It can be solved by introducing "urgent inbox", followed by "very urgent inbox"...etc.

Re:arms race

[DeadboltX]

The simplest automatic filter rule I can think of for priority mail is to look for email addresses that I have sent mail to. If I have sent email to a particular email address then chances are I am interested in mail that comes from that address. This would easily cut my inbox down to 1/6 its size and would almost completely separate the "human discussion" emails from the other various types of emails I receive (invoices, alerts, advertisements etc)

Re:arms race

[sorak]

So you game it by asking lots of questions. :)

Re:arms race

[amRadioHed]

That's just silly, who would try to game it? My friends and family who email me certainly won't. Anyone who would try to game this to get your attention would be sending junk mail which is already taken care of quite well by Google's spam filters.

That said I'll give this a try, but I don't think it will be of much use to me. The mail filters I've already set up to prioritize mail work quite well.

Re:arms race

[bunratty]

It isn't really sarcasm. If you complain that some things (emails, IP packets) get priority over others, the solution is to drop all priorities and treat all entities as equal. When you don't see important email messages in the spam or your VoIP calls cut out because of someone downloading porn, you'll see why it's important to give some pieces of information more priority over others.

How about snail mail neutrality? Demand an end to overnight packages!

What does it say when we can't tell a sarcastic comment about net neutrality from a legitimate one?

Re:arms race

[sznupi]

Or maybe people just wised up a bit, generally. Forwarding chains "back" would only so-so help with that, I guess (isn't that almost a confirmation?) - I usually provided a link to a particular specimen (extremelly quick & easy to find) on a site cataloguing chainmails, together with short explanation of carbon and blind carbon copy... (while using them of course - roughly speaking, everybody was seeing only their email & the one of forwarders in my direction)

Seemed to work fine, often also with "angry at myself" apologies.

BTW, nice thing about labels is that they allow for easy exclusion of large part of emails while searching; so I still try to use them despite not being very disciplined, too.

Re:arms race

[WuphonsReach]

It's supposed to learn from your email-reading habits, so it's something like Thunderbird's Bayesian spamfilter, i.e. gaming this would be difficult.

If it's anything like Thunderbird's spam filter, it's doomed to failure.

The only tool that I've seen do bayesian learning correctly and get the results right was Spambayes for Microsoft Outlook with it's "spam / maybe spam / ham" classification. I never had to look at the messages tagged as spam by Spambayes, because it always got it right. I did have to look at the "maybe spam", and then tell Spambayes what was spam/ham. It was a quick learner and you would rarely see the same spam/ham issue once trained.

Plus, you could pre-train the filter by providing it with a few hundred spam/ham messages.

Thunderbird's filter, OTOH, is a complete black box, with only 2 levels (spam or ham), and obtuse. Plus, if it decides to move something to the spam folder that isn't spam - you have to go rescue it by hand. And then you have to move it back by hand. (Spambayes would move mis-marked mail back to the original folder automatically.)

Re:arms race

[pbhj]

TB's spam filter for me barely works. It keep displaying things that are almost identical to junk I've already marked. Does it work well for you? I've tried restarting the training a couple of times but it never seems to do any good.

Re:arms race

[jgagnon]

As noted previously, if you mark the important ones "more important" and mark the less important ones "less important" then it will eventually work itself out and you'll be fine. Or, if you choose, don't use the system.

How long?

[killmenow]

About as long as it takes google to "monetize" the process so the people buying ads get their e-mails on top.

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.

Re:Spam detection is much easier

[esocid]

You seem to misunderstand how it works. It doesn't sort your mail on its own. Did you even watch the little video? You can tag who/what is important and in addition to regularly sorting out spam, it will send emails with people you actively correspond with into your priority box. Just like with your spam box, you can tag other messages as important, or less-important, and they go to their respective inboxes.

I haven't had any spam get through their filters, but I have a 3 tiered email system. Gmails for personal/work (Universities have been migrating to gmail for a while now), hotmail for signups, and yahoo for throwaway signups. Hotmail has a tough time, and 2-3 a week get through. Yahoo is just a lost cause.

Re:Spam detection is much easier

[Just Some Guy]

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?

As it turns out, yes. I was using this a decade ago in Gnus.

Re:Spam detection is much easier

[arkane1234]

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?

Funny, I get a barrage of mail, and over 60% is spam. All of the spam is caught as spam, and 1 out of 200-300 is a false-positive as spam (which I flag as 'not spam' and never have the problem again). I'd say that the system is doing a damned good job at spam filtering.

Re:Spam detection is much easier

[brunes69]

The thing is, all it is doing is prioritizing, IE, adjusting the sort order of your inbox.

The way it works today, stuff in your inbox is "prioritized" by first-come-first-serve, which is pretty craptacular. It can't get any worse.

Re:Spam detection is much easier

[edxwelch]

There's a lot more false positives than you think. Gmail seems to block about every shared ip address in existance. That means a lot of legitimate email doesn't even make it to your spam box.

I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[nido]

There's a lot of crap that I used to think was important, or thought I'd be interested in... But the messages just piled up.

One day i just started deleting. I think I removed 7,000 'conversations' from my gmail inbox in an hour. Now I'm much better about deleting crap emails (without opening them) instead of letting them languish...

This 'priority inbox' will be interesting... Glad they're thinking about the problem - too bad it won't unsubscribe you from lists automatically. :)

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[BStroms]

Yeah, potentially interesting, but I leave gmail open in a tab virtually all the time and check emails as they come in. So I don't know if it really has much benefit to me. Could be useful when I take extended trips where I don't have email access in helping the important emails catch my eye. But seeing as I honestly can't even remember the last time I've gone a full week without checking my email, I really doubt this is going to be all that helpful.

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[Laxori666]

If you don't check email on a constant basis throughout the day, you'll probably end up wasting less time on it. Then once you have a few emails at a time to read, something like this might be useful.

You would also waste less time if you stop reading/posting on slashdot, though... so not sure how much it applies =P.

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[Laxori666]

I noticed this with google reader recently. I had like 40 feeds, 20 different comics, that I'd check throughout the day. I just unsubscribed from 80% of them and realized I don't really miss it. The only difference is that now it's more obvious to me when I'm trying to waste time, since I just open and find an empty google reader page. And now it seems I've resorted to slashdot..

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[arkane1234]

There comes a point in life when you don't judge effectiveness on "wasting time" doing things.
It boils down to one thing: do I want to do this.
if not, it's wasting time :)

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[Abcd1234]

Should I ask why you didn't just create filters to have traffic from those lists automatically tagged appropriately and removed from your inbox?

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[nido]

I did have a few such filters... But for the most part I never read the messages. What's the point of receiving an email if I'm never going to look at it? That's the kind of information I use a search engine for.

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[Abcd1234]

I did have a few such filters... But for the most part I never read the messages. What's the point of receiving an email if I'm never going to look at it

I totally agree, I was just reacting to this statement:

I think I removed 7,000 'conversations' from my gmail inbox in an hour.

Which is an easily solved problem, assuming you actually cared about the content of those emails.

Re:I started unsubscribing from mailing lists...

[nido]

I think I removed 7,000 'conversations' from my gmail inbox in an hour.

Which is an easily solved problem, assuming you actually cared about the content of those emails.

Ah, I see the confusion there. I actually used the gmail 'delete' feature because I didn't care about them. So it was more than just removing them from my inbox, as I'd originally stated.

Good work. Keep trying.

[John Hasler]

Someday, in the far future, Gmail may be almost as good as Gnus.

Intriguing, but...

[jbarr]

This is intriguing, but it just seems to add yet another layer. Is it really needed? By leveraging Filters and Labels, you can automatically categorize email to whatever you want.

I also use the "Multiple Inboxes" Labs add-on that gives me a second "inbox" that is defined to display only "starred" items. no matter where the message is (in the inbox of archived with a label) I can always see those which I classify as "important." And by using Filters, this gets done automatically for many messages.

Re:Intriguing, but...

[Skreems]

That's good for people who want to set up a lot of manual labels (I'm one of them). However, there are a lot of people who don't, and even I find myself not taking the time to set up a filter for some of the smaller sources of "nice to have but unimportant" emails that I get. This does it automatically based on your behavior of how you interact with the stuff that makes it through the filter. Seems like a good idea to me.

Re:Intriguing, but...

[tag]

I also use the "Multiple Inboxes" Labs add-on that gives me a second "inbox" that is defined to display only "starred" items

That's exactly what I did. When I turned on Priority Inbox, it turned off the Multiple Inboxes, but now I have the equivalent of three inboxes -- Important & Unread, Starred, everything else. But the duplication is removed (previously, starred messages showed in both inboxes).

All my rules still work. but if something is also caught by Priority flag, it goes to the top. If I read it and don't archive it, it moves to Starred or Everything Else based on whether my filters had starred it in the first place.

Looks useful so far. We'll see. I may redo some of my star filters to flag for priority instead.

I can also see this working as part of a GTD system -- it's sort of Action, Follow Up and everything else. But not quite. Still needs some tweaking for that to work right.

Re:Intriguing, but...

[DragonWriter]

This is intriguing, but it just seems to add yet another layer. Is it really needed? By leveraging Filters and Labels, you can automatically categorize email to whatever you want.

By using filters and layers you can manually create rules to categorize email.

Priority inbox doesn't require you to manually create rules, instead it infers the likely priority of mail based on your reading and replying habits.

They both have their uses.

Re:Intriguing, but...

[BetterSense]

Please don't use "leverage" as a transitive verb. Not on Slashdot at least; save it for management meetings.

Re:Intriguing, but...

[gfreeman]

Maybe another layer, but one you probably won't see too much of I bet. This seems to be a TiVo for email. Learns as you go what you deem important, and filters accordingly.

Multiple Inbox

[RevRagnarok]

That's my favorite lab item. I have like 5 - mailing lists, purchases I am waiting for in the mail, TODO, etc... I wonder if it is compatible?

Re:Multiple Inbox

[tag]

As of this moment, it's not. I even made some changes to my MI settings to test, and none show up.

Re:jason-za wrote that? Really?

[ojintoad]

Yeah it got updated, so my post is now moot.

The nigerian prince

[Drakkenmensch]

But he needs my help right now! He's just trying to get the millions of dollars stolen from him in the revolution!

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?

[clone53421]

Exactly. Filters + Skip the Inbox (archive it).

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.

Email is overused

[hannson]

Simple solution: Unsubscribe

I used to get over hundred emails a week; newsletters, stuff from mailing lists and lots of emails of almost no importance to me. I unsubscribed from everything, after all we have this thing called RSS so there's no need to get the same information sent to the inbox.

I also watched a Google TechTalk called Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann and have at most 5 emails in my inbox any day.

We've got RSS for news, newsletters, IM for short messages like "What's for lunch today?", I feel like mailing lists drown my inbox so I don't let them email me at all, so there are a lot of ways to limit the emails you get each day.

Re:Email is overused

[siriuskase]

Easier said than done. I get a daily feed of slashdot into my gmail account. I don't need it since I prefer going directly to the website. But, I can't unsubscribe, even when I follow the simple directions.

Re:Email is overused

[pz]

Easier said than done. I get a daily feed of slashdot into my gmail account. I don't need it since I prefer going directly to the website. But, I can't unsubscribe, even when I follow the simple directions.

Mark it as spam. Do that a handful of times and you'll never see it again.

Re:Email is overused

[xaxa]

Why not just set up a filter to send it straight into the Trash folder?

Re:Email is overused

[siriuskase]

Thanks, that would work. I just think if slashdot is going to include an unsubscribe link, it should work. Otherwise, they really are just another spammer.

Re:Email is overused

[sys_mast]

Agreed, I started using igoogle and rss feeds instead of email lists. If I find free time I read the rss feeds, if not no big loss. Less stuff in my inbox other than the one or two lists I really want to read as they arrive.

Re:Email is overused

[clone53421]

Try going to http://slashdot.org/my/messages and setting the preferences to “Web” or “No Messages” instead of “E-mail”.

Re:Email is overused

[siriuskase]

Yeah? You just quoted the instructions. The procedure doesn't work. Even if I click on Save Prefs. So, it's a little deeper than me being stupid. Does it work on anyone's computer?

Re:Email is overused

[siriuskase]

I decided to try again. Web is not an option. But, instead of saying No Messages, I've changed it to Email. I know, that's backwards, but since the right way doesn't work, I'll see what happens if I simply toggle the setting. Then, if I'm still getting messages, I can come back and try to turn them off. If I still get slashdot spam, i'll just start using the spam button. I suspect that part of slashdot was programmed so long ago that it has rotted in place. But, hey, I mean it. Since you mentioned an option that doesn't exist, I don't believe you've visited that page yourself in awhile.

Re:Email is overused

[clone53421]

Um, no, actually I went and found the actual link (as D2 doesn’t give you a proper link – it’s all Javascript and AJAX) and that is what I posted. And, as it happens, I visited it to make sure of myself before I posted it. “Web” is an option on many of the items – not all of them.

Did you even click the link I posted – or were you perhaps in the D2 system? (If you went through help & preferences, you were in D2.)

I’ve found that the original discussion / “new” discussion (D2) systems have clashed at times – for a while my account was screwed up (D2 just plain not working – links loading new pages instead of AJAX – browsing threshold mysteriously locked at +2 despite saying it was at -1), but I finally got it straightened out. In my case, it was the /my/comments page that fixed it – my all-else-failed was clicking the “Restore Defaults” button at the very bottom, and then it was working. It resets all the options on that page, though.

sylpheed with filtering

[Mr. Slippery]

Is there anyone tech-savvy out there who's not already filtering their mail into a bunch of folders or some other means of prioritization? I use Sylpheed, which easily filters my mail into various folders. And by using mh folders, messages are stored in flat files on which I can use the standard Unix-y tools like grep -- and which are easily migrated to a new machine. My e-mail archives go back over 14 years.

I'm pretty sure that the filters I set up manually will be much more useful to me than Google's guesses about what I find important.

Re:sylpheed with filtering

[Skreems]

Is there anyone tech-savvy out there who's not already filtering their mail into a bunch of folders

Um... I think this is for people who may NOT be quite as tech-savvy as you...

Re:sylpheed with filtering

[macraig]

You mean there's people who are so un-savvy that they're still using folders, rather than custom views or saved searches?

Re:sylpheed with filtering

[Skreems]

There's people who may not know about those things, yes, or may not care enough to take the time to painstakingly set up filters for every type of thing they get. Hell, I use filters to add labels to my messages, and I still prefer using them as folders to searches. Gmail's partial-word match is non-existant, and even when it does work, it's surprisingly hard to remember a specific word in an email you want to find sometimes. I have much better luck with remembering generally what category a thing is and where I "put" it than remembering keywords to search by.

Forced Enable

[Skraut]

Unfortunately I had to enable this, as trying to access my corporate gmail through Chrome on Linux always caused the flash "intro movie" to crash the browser. Even selecting "No Thanks" still caused it to hang, and then eventually play the video in the background. The only way to check my email this morning was to turn the damn thing on.

Re:Forced Enable

[esocid]

I had no video popup unless I clicked the "New Priority Inbox Feature" thing. I'm running chrome -unstable on Fedora 12. No problem on my desktop running the same on F13 x86_64.

Re:Forced Enable

[Skraut]

Interesting. I'm running 6.0.472.41 beta on the latest Ubuntu. It was Flash which was hanging even though the video wasn't selected.

Boolean distinctions? Labels?

[nbossett]

Why place email into strict "important" and "everything else" sets rather than just sorting the unread items in the regular inbox according to their weighting system? That would both save screen real estate and avoid problems of an important item being scored just under some threshold and relegated to the everything-else category. Normal rule definitions would be nice too: "Always flag email from '@foo.com' as important and label as 'work'".

Re:You will disclose even more information than no

[Woefdram]

Well, I certainly won't use it. I don't use Google anyway, except their search engine. It took a bit of work, but even though I have an Android, they're not getting my address book or agenda. Yup, I might be paranoid (ok, I admit I am...) but Google knows far too much about its users.

As Eric Schmidt recently said: "At the moment we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." And according to the article (and simple common sense), "Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future." This new mailfiltering proves just that...

That doesn't spell much good for the future...

Threading

[DirkBalognapantz]

I just wish to hell they would allow users to turn off the threaded conversations. Google has been acting like a smarty-pants little child holding their breath on this one. Finding items around by date (especially when you only know the approximate date) would be so much easier if the just put their big boy pants on and enabled this.

Re:Threading

[DirkBalognapantz]

Finding items around by date ...

Before anyone mentions my grammar, I meant "finding items by date." I rush to post as the office has eyes.

Re:Threading

[arkane1234]

OH god, you're one of "those" people...

Re:Threading

[DirkBalognapantz]

OH god, you're one of "those" people...

Sure. Sometimes. The option to turn it off would be useful. Even when Gnome had spacial view in Nautilus set as the default, you could at least disable it. No one way of sorting information is best for all people in all situations. But that's cool. You're one of "those other" people.

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.

Re:Threading

[clone53421]

That's easy, in the search box type: "from:abc@example.com after:YYYY/MM/DD before:YYYY/MM/DD"

It would’ve been easy if I hadn’t tried MM/DD/YY, MM/DD/YYYY, and DD/MM/YYYY before finally giving up.

The helpful suggestion “date” when you type “after” could stand to be a little more specific.

Re:Threading

[enoz]

I just wish Google would get a clue about how email threading works. GMail's threading by subject is a horrible hack that is wrong more often than it is right.

Re:Threading

[clone53421]

I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of significant portions of the world using DD/MM/YYYY...

Re:Threading

[VJ42]

It would’ve been easy if I hadn’t tried MM/DD/YY, MM/DD/YYYY, and DD/MM/YYYY before finally giving up.

The helpful suggestion “date” when you type “after” could stand to be a little more specific.

I agree it could be more helpful, after I tried DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY (the two that cover 99% of the world's usage) and found they didn't work I just did a main Google search for "Gmail search date range" (or something similar, I forget).
I couldn't be bothered to work it out myself when I guessed millions of other people had already done so, but research is my sepeciality.

Re:flash bug with chrome?

[esocid]

No problem here. Running the -unstable version too.

Reply-Request

[Doc Ruby]

I'd like to see GMail support a Reply-Request header that can be set by the sender and displayed to the recipient. That way when I send a question to someone I can sort my outstanding messages not yet replied to, and send a followup. An automatic timeout that prompts me with a composed followup request would be good. Recipients could see which requests are outstanding in their inbox. When my actual request is satisfied I could mark the thread as completed. The message IDs of the messages could link them all together.

Email features like that one are hard to get started on one's own, a chicken/egg problem without the ability to upgrade a lot of other people's email systems. Microsoft doesn't innovate protocol features. So I'd like to see GMail do so, especially if Google is pursuing these kinds of productivity features.

Re:Reply-Request

[macraig]

You could solve that in Thunderbird with a tag applied after sending and a custom view or search folder. No need to involve Google at all.

Re:So, slashdot

[mlts]

Latest move to prod is sort of stopped -- I thought it was a dev VM, but powered off the wrong box from the command line.

Sorry about that.

Re:FILTERS DO THE JOB

[TheRaven64]

If you only get ten emails a day, then you are definitely not in the target market for this. A lot of people get well over a hundred, but maybe only ten or twenty need urgent action. They are the target. I don't use Gmail, nor would I want to, but I've thought about implementing a feature like this a few times in the last few years and never got around to it, so Google deserves some credit for actually bothering. More, if it actually works...

So let me get this straight

[NYMeatball]

Their theories are, in order:

#1: "Everyone has too much email!"
#2: "Rules are too complicated to use!"
#3: "Priority inbox is better because they're just really rules, but you have no control over them!"

I appreciate their effort, but this honestly just seems like another way for Google to engage in self appreciation and try to write users rules for them better than the users can. Can they do it? With enough data and time, probably. But in the long run, its not very useful for any user with a hint of intelligence, and like other people are already stating - the inner workings will be dissected enough to where people will filter messages to get a higher rank.

Re:So let me get this straight

[DragonWriter]

Wrong, on all three counts.

Their theories are more like #1:

1. Lots of people (not everyone) have too many emails in their inbox to tell the important ones at a glance,
2. Manually creating and updating rules, while useful for lots of categorization applications, is a clumsy and time consuming way of getting a good first-cut of what is likely to be important for many users. (not "Rules are too complicated to use.")
3. Priority inbox will be useful for many users because it creates prioritization rules that are based on users reading and replying behavior which seems likely to provide a good first-cut of what is important to the user with minimal user involvement.

But in the long run, its not very useful for any user with a hint of intelligence,

Given that I imagine its been used inside of Google before being released as a public product, I doubt that.

and like other people are already stating - the inner workings will be dissected enough to where people will filter messages to get a higher rank.

Since prioritization for each user is based on what that user reads and respond to, in order to game the system the sender would essentially to have access to your GMail usage history; if that's the case, I'd say that worrying about that information used to manipulate Priority Inbox would be the least of your concerns.

Re:So let me get this straight

[amRadioHed]

You didn't quite get it straight. You do have control of the rules. You can increase or decrease the priority of individual emails, and more importantly you can turn it off if you don't like it.

I went back to a regular IMAP client

[ducomputergeek]

I just went back to using Mac Mail and my iPhone checking all my accounts via IMAP. Everything keeps synced up. Very rarely do I log into Gmail from the web anymore.

Re:I went back to a regular IMAP client

[MonsterTrimble]

Honestly, I think an E-mail client with this type of functionality, an address book which works as well as Outlook's and the ability to handle POP & IMAP the same way would be the cat's ass.

Of course, I think Thunderbird 2 was the best E-mail client I ever had, so YMMV

An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

I like what they've done here. They basically took their spam filter and inverted it, creating the anti-spam, aka 'priority inbox'. It is genuinely clever.

It is also an absolute non-problem. The basic issue here is a human one, and is easily corrected.

Lesson #1: Your inbox is not an oracle into the past. You do not need everyone to carbon copy you in on everything they ever send 'just in case'. This is absurd and sets you up for failure by accepting mail you never actually intend to read. Instead reverse the thought and insist that people only send you things you actually NEED to see.

Lesson #2: Lists and announcements are completely unnecessary. If you want to go collaborate on a topic, find an appropriate forum on which to do so. Email's characteristics are extremely poor for this use, and the 'junk' is obscuring the mail from above.

Lesson #3: Reject crap. Ask your family to only include you in on the 'really good' ones. Snopes everything and be snarky about it. Ask that people not send you things that they're too lazy/busy to look up first. Unsubscribe from EVERYTHING that you don't actually intend to read on a daily basis. See Lesson #2, but if you want to know and have time to research it, it is out there a mere Google search away. As above, if you don't actually intend to read it, see that it stops. The junk obscures the good stuff.

Lesson #4: Delete, delete, delete. Just because Google advertises gigabytes of storage, this doesn't mean you actually have that much important mail. New version of VMWare is out? That's terrific...deleted! You're not going to want to search against that again later, trust me. 37th time someone has said Mars will be as large as the Moon - DELETED, before I even got to the end of the subject line. Slashdot's been replying to you all weekend, and you no longer care to go back to old topics? Oh, so deleted...

Lesson #5: Stay on top of it. Glance at your box right away, star the keepers, and delete the junk. Now do this at least once an hour. It only takes about ten seconds, and will save you hours of cleanup later...

Lesson #6: Reply right away, wherever possible. Even a simple "I got your mail, and will get back to you later" sends positive reinforcement back, just so long as you're starring it as well so you do actually get back to it. The primary benefit here is, if you're overzealous with Lesson #4, someone will notice that you didn't respond, and will re-query if it was genuinely important.

There may be more, but the point is, this is a completely human situation that can be easily managed. This 'solution' is honestly a good way to go about making the problem worse, rather than better. You're able to tolerate more and more bad mail, and you still never intend to actually read most of it.

Think about the term 'thousands of emails per day'. There are only 480 minutes in an average eight hour work day. If you're actually, honestly, genuinely reading over two emails a minute, then you need to sub some of that mail reading out to a part-timer. You'd be sitting at 960 mails per day, which is still not even two thousand, which qualifies for the 's' at the end of that word. If so, you're not getting any work done other than reading email. An unpaid intern can read mail just as well as you can, so where's the value in that? Now, on the other hand, if you're not reading it then why on earth is it in your inbox? Are you expecting the days to get longer at some point?? You're going to go back and get caught up on them? Um, no. You're not. Not ever. Just deal with that fact now, rather than later, and email becomes a lot more pleasant.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[jvkjvk]

Sooo....

Your solution is to make everyone use the application the way you want them to?

I guess that the same solution should be used for malware.

However, back in the real world, what if people don't want to do things your way?

I would guess that Google's solution could be right for those people.

Regards

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:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

I'll suppose you failed to consider the final paragraph, but even if you merely disagree with the notion that this technology makes the problem worse, consider this:

Allowing someone to email you is a choice.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

If people are spamming me, then I suppose I'll block their email addresses.

It isn't as if there isn't any consent here.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[jvkjvk]

What? Perhaps you were replying to someone else?

What does this have to do the fact that you deem this technology worthless? Or with your proposal as to how everyone "should" act?

Sure, these features may be worthless to you, because you have a defined procedure either obviates the problem and/or deals with it in a different manner.

So your statement:

It is also an absolute non-problem. The basic issue here is a human one, and is easily corrected.

Is not only wrong, it's horribly wrong.

Now, if everyone just did things the way you wanted them to, i might be able to see your point.

But they don't. And won't.

And so, this is a problem, and Google has some up with one solution.

The fact that you think "train the users" is acceptable means you haven't been paying much attention.

Regards.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

Now, if everyone just did things the way you wanted them to, i might be able to see your point.

But they don't. And won't.

My advice is for your personal use of your own mailbox. You'll have to be kind and define who 'they' is in your statement. If 'they' means people who send you emails, then I suggest you stop receiving them until they comply with your wishes. If someone were to call your cell in the middle of the night just to fart into the handset, you'd stop taking their calls. Same thing here.

If 'they' is 'you', then kindly sign up for this valuable service. Just bear in mind, however, that you'll be back to this same position eventually, in need of a 'priority priority inbox'.

The fact that you think "train the users" is acceptable means you haven't been paying much attention.

I'm not sure where the contention lies between us, but whatever I did to warrant such a tone from you, I apologize.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[jvkjvk]

My advice is for your personal use of your own mailbox.

Sure, but if people don't use it that way?

You'll have to be kind and define who 'they' is in your statement.

Everyone who doesn't do it, or doesn't want to do it the way you do?

I'm not sure where the contention lies between us, but whatever I did to warrant such a tone from you, I apologize.

I'm not sure why you think my tone is out of line. Perhaps you could explain why you feel that way?

The contention probably comes from these baseless assertions:

It is also an absolute non-problem. The basic issue here is a human one, and is easily corrected.

There may be more, but the point is, this is a completely human situation that can be easily managed.

Not that I don't think your list has merit. However, proposing people change their ways to solve this type of problem just won't work (it's been tried and tried, and tried! - look at computer security if you want examples).

Therefore, while this may not be the feature set you are looking for, that doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

Regards.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

I'll say it again:

You'll be back to this same position eventually, in need of a 'priority priority inbox'.

Accepting emails you never intend to read means you have a lot of email you never intend to read in your inbox. There's no amount of technology that can undo basic logic. The flaw in this system is that it cannot stop you from subscribing to yet another mailing list, etc. If you don't change your ways, you'll certainly make the problem worse, because sloppiness is NOT a technology problem. It is a human problem.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[DragonWriter]

I'll suppose you failed to consider the final paragraph

I'll suppose I did not.

but even if you merely disagree with the notion that this technology makes the problem worse,

Yes, I disagree that stopping the problems caused by excessive nonpriority, nonabusive email making it harder to identify the email that warrants immediate attention makes that problem worse.

You seem to conceptualize the problem as the mere existence of email that doesn't warrant immediate attention. To the extent that it is a problem, its a much smaller problem for the user than the problem caused by the equal prominence of that email in a UI with the email that does warrant immediate attention.

consider this:

Allowing someone to email you is a choice.

In a sense, this is true, though its a choice a lot of people don't want to make on a positive basis. I am probably much more prone to using and managing manually-defined filters than most people, and even I don't want to add authorized senders to a whitelist, nor do I want to punish any but the most egregious offenders with a blacklist. (I've been using internet email since 1990, and heavily since about 1994, and, aside from spam, blocked exactly one person, ever.)

You may wish to blacklist (or fail to whitelist, whatever) everyone who doesn't conform to narrow personal rules that limit your inbox to high-priority items. And, if so, that's a great solution for you. But I don't think most of the people using email prefer that solution to the issue of assuring that the most important email is the most prominent.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

But I don't think most of the people using email prefer that solution to the issue of assuring that the most important email is the most prominent.

'Most people' will select that which requires the least amount of effort, that is true.

But in the end, it won't really work, because as I've said elsewhere in this thread, being undisciplined isn't a technology problem, but a human one.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[jvkjvk]

Accepting emails you never intend to read means you have a lot of email you never intend to read in your inbox. There's no amount of technology that can undo basic logic.

So what? Your tautology has no implication.

The flaw in this system is that it cannot stop you from subscribing to yet another mailing list, etc

So what? It's not intended to make people do things the way YOU want them to. It is intended to to separate the emails you know you have to read/act on, from all the ones you don't.

If you don't change your ways, you'll certainly make the problem worse

You'll be back to this same position eventually, in need of a 'priority priority inbox'.

Well, that really depends on how good their system is, doesn't it? Why would you think there would be a need for a meta tier?

If you only occasionally look at that the lkml digest, it'll still be there if you want it, but it won't be brought to your attention. If you subscribe to a million lists, only the ones you regularly read will be highlighted. What is the problem again with having all those other emails?

because sloppiness is NOT a technology problem. It is a human problem

Well, first I have to disagree that this is sloppiness. Second this is not a human "problem". It is human behaviour, and that's why something like this will be a godsend to a bunch of people (because it *is* a problem in the technological sense - they cannot find what they need to when they need it).

The software deals with the second, technological issue. Your crusade to make this a human issue will never get off the ground.

The fact that you see their behaviour as "sloppiness" and a problem just seems to indicate you don't like how other people do things.

Regards.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[BobMcD]

I'm not crusading, and you're either really bad at listening or really bad at explaining what it is that you mean, but I do hope you have a great day.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[jvkjvk]

Yes, of course. It couldn't be a communication issue between both of us.

I'm glad you cleared that up.

I hope you have a good day too.

Regards.

Re:An elegant solution to a non-problem

[gfreeman]

Allowing someone to email you is a choice.

Much like the choice "Do I want to be employed, or unemployed?". At work I have no choice but to accept all incoming emails. It's the default setting anyway. In fact, once you decide to get a domestic email address, until you make a choice, someone can email you. Mass spams might get to you accidentally one day even if you don't advertise your email address.

So I think you have it backwards, it would be more accurate to say that disallowing someone to email you is a choice, because the default is to allow it.

How about using your Inbox for what it is?

[gregthebunny]

It's called the "Inbox" for a reason. It should only be used for messages that have arrived and need your attention. Everything else should be filed accordingly. GMail makes mail organization stupidly easy. Just create labels and apply as many of them as you need to each message. Put a star or other flags on things that need follow-up. And when you're done with something, archive it. All these new GMail features are unnecessary. :(

Re:How about using your Inbox for what it is?

[jvkjvk]

For you.

For the way you do things.

Perhaps Google has found that many people don't do things the way you do, and are trying to provide them with a good user experience that facilitates the way they work instead of trying to get them to work the way you would like them to?

Re:How about using your Inbox for what it is?

[VJ42]

It's called the "Inbox" for a reason. It should only be used for messages that have arrived and need your attention. Everything else should be filed accordingly. GMail makes mail organization stupidly easy. Just create labels and apply as many of them as you need to each message. Put a star or other flags on things that need follow-up. And when you're done with something, archive it.

This is exactly what I do, I've got a gazillion different labels, only very few emails actually make it to my inbox after filters are applied.

All these new GMail features are unnecessary. :(

I wouldn't say that, if they can even sort the few emails in my inbox then I'm all for it.

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:Good work. Keep trying.

[vlm]

Someday, in the far future, Gmail may be almost as good as Gnus.

Old saying: all operating systems are destined to reinvent unix, poorly.

New saying: all applications are destined to reinvent emacs, poorly.

False dichotomy

[Twinbee]

I'm not so sure about the false dichotomy again here. Things aren't black and white, there are shades of grey, so mail should be sorted according to a rating, rather than a seperate folder.

Re:You will disclose even more information than no

[natehoy]

Whaddya mean, "starting from now"? Google has always collected this information since Gmail was invitation-only and invitations were hard to come by. What do you read? What do you re-read? What do you reply to? What do you save? What do you delete immediately? What do you archive into folders? This is all valuable stuff to them.

Now they are just showing you how much they know about your habits, by attempting to guess what you wanted to do before you do it based on the patterns they already know about you. And they'll be right most of the time, because they've had as long as you've had Gmail to learn your habits.

Re:Privacy? Really?

[natehoy]

Somehow, you veered off-course and put a very interesting discussion about aviation into a Google Priority Inbox thread.

I think we need to pull the black box and get the cockpit voice recorder tapes. Were you playing Solitaire while flying Slashdot again? ;)

Re:Good work. Keep trying.

[Zed Pobre]

That's appropriate, since Emacs is famous for attempting to become an operating system.

Re:You will disclose even more information than no

[Ioann]

I agree with you, but the difference is that starting from now their algorithms will be enhanced by your active cooperation (because people will start to flag mails that get in the wrong categories). So as I titled before, you will disclose EVEN MORE information than now!

So now what?

[hesaigo999ca]

So i guess now, any spam meant to be seen will have the priority tag set to true always...great, even when you see the advantages of something being brought out, you can also see the uselessness of it based on what we live with on a daily basis.

Automatically generated email

[Sunshinerat]

Well, if the sender is a system that has issues, and you do not reply to that system but use the phone to yell at people...
To gmail it will look like you are ignoring these emails, especially when the subject line tells you what is wrong.

PopFile?

[macraig]

Ah, so PopFile's generalized classification system lives again, reanimated in another body?

Re:Perhaps I'm paranoid, but...

[macraig]

Go get PopFile and do the same thing completely local in private, then. Tinfoil hat not included, you'll have to fold your own.

Re: 'genuinely clever'? Not really:

[macraig]

PopFile.

Been there, done that... and without the privacy concerns this will engender.

Re:Perhaps I'm paranoid, but...

[amRadioHed]

You're paranoid. Let's not be naive and think Google needed to add this feature in order to know which emails you pay attention to.

Re:Gmail Still Sucks

[arkane1234]

Ok, Gmail sucks. I'm okay with using something that sucks if I like it and it works perfectly for me.
With your talking about forwarding it to another account, it sounds like you're unaware of IMAP and POP3. Just figured I'd kindly let you know... ya know... about something you could use that's not another forwarding thing.

So...

[CeruleanDragon]

Google's finally added technology that's been used in Outlook, Thunderbird, even Yahoo Mail, for the better part of the last decade and a half or so?

Filters and sub-folders! Yay! Amazing new technology! XD

Yes, I read the article, yes I see it's a little different than that and it'll be interesting to see how it works in practice. Still, I've been using filters in Yahoo mail, Outlook (when I work at a company that uses Exchange/Outlook), and Thunderbird (or Eudora years ago), to do this exact thing. Email from a friend? Goes here. Email with a specific subject line for a group? Goes here. It's not complicated or mind boggling.

I know, I'm being one of those party-poopers that craps on the Googlites' fun, what can I say... though I use it as my primary mail, it's always missed several key features for me. And their Google Talk still sucks. Bugs that have been in it for years, WTH Google?

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.

Priority Inbox overloaded....

[ProgramErgoSum]

just as, everything used to be filed in the file cabinet marked as 'Misc'. :-D

Never send list traffic to the primary INBOX

[erice]

Setup a folder for each list and then filter, use different email address, whatever it takes to direct traffic to the right folder.

Sending list traffic to the inbox just clogs in the inbox and makes it difficult to follow threads on the lists.

speaking of Xibit

[freezin fat guy]

What's with the annoying music autoplaying in Chrome and Opera? Don't they test Gmail features in Chrome?!

Re:speaking of Xibit

[Bryansix]

I'm pretty sure that is a flash plug in. Also, its Youtube which... ah damn, they own that too. Ok, I guess it IS their fault

The wheel, you're reinventing it.

[mcmonkey]

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.

So it seems being able to sort message by sender would be useful in this situation. I know it would help me. It's one of the features I use most in Outlook at work.

So Gmail, why won't you sort messages by sender?

Re:Good work. Keep trying.

[geminidomino]

Too bad they could never land a decent text editor.

Precisely

[ZmeiGorynych]

I can't be bothered to setup filters, labels, whatever, since gmail is my secondary account I spend about 5mins/day on (primary is work, which blocks gmail).

So gmail doing some basic filtering for me based on my past behavior is an awesome feature I look forward to.

This could be marginally useful

[brentonboy]

But what would be really useful is a snooze button for emails that would archive them for a few days (or whatever time you specify for that email) and then have it pop up in your inbox as if new after that.

Your kid can't find his keys, again!

[Mask]

Assume that your kid forgets/loses house keys every other week, in which case your neighbor sends an urgent e-mail titled "Your kid can't find his keys, again!", which happens the only e-mail he/she ever sends you. Now assume that you never reply to this e-mail but rush home, instead, to open the doors.

Is this Google feature going to downgrade this repeating e-mail, just because I never reply to it?

For you single nerd types, how about an automated "XXX system is going down for reboot". You may want to look at it in time, especially if you try to analyze this XXX system recurring issue. (I guess that most people would not use Google for this due to privacy concerns)

No, the worst are those who

[clone53421]

...begin the message in the subject.