Slashdot Mirror
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."
Priority Post (beta)
"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.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
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...
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.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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?
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
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.
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. :)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
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.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Only the one in my bathroom.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Only the one in my bathroom.
Ah, you're a TiSP subscriber too eh? ;)
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.