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Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization
Z80xxc! writes: The Gmail team announced "Inbox" this morning, a new way to manage email. Inbox is email, but organized differently. Messages are grouped into "bundles" of similar types. "Highlights" pull out and display key information from messages, and messages can be "snoozed" to come back later as a reminder. Inbox is invite-only right now, and you can email inbox@google.com to request an invite.
I'd be just as happy if they'd leave gmail alone. It was fine years ago without all the ****. That said, I might be a crusty old fart and in need of shaking up.
... now we get to see comments everywhere flooded with "Can I haz invite code, plz. user@genericdomain.com kthx"
Automated digesting of email could be a useful feature of AI.
If this is more of the same, I think I'll opt out if/when Google decides to roll it out to the whole wide world. I like GMail (beta) just the way it is. YMMV.
It combines the worst of mobile, email, and social. ...yet.
At least they're not injecting it into Gmail like all their previous attempts...
I like my current bundles... new messages are bundled at the top, just above the older messages.
... and never come back to it?
The error that the other server returned was:
550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that
550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more
550-5.2.1 information, please visit
550 5.2.1 http://support.google.com/mail... dy7si138331wib.0 - gsmtp
And at google's scale - impressive
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
You're not forced into any of those features. You don't have to use the tabs, Unread/Important-first inboxes, or threaded view. Please take a look at the settings page for once and stop your bitching.
I thought they removed "Beta" from Gmail already.
So this is the Google Wave thing that nobody knew WTF it was for, but which everyone kept saying was super awesome and the way of the future ... but for email?
I'm afraid I'm not really overly interested.
I guess it's cool that someone is still trying to design new things and think about things differently. But from reading TFA, this sounds like something which I'm not sure why I'd want it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You should be happy. This will likely mean Gmail won't get the types of changes you don't like, as they'll end up in this "Inbox" thing instead.
Can I mail outbox@google.com to opt out?
Just leave email alone. It works just fine which is why no company has been able to replace it with a proprietary alternative. I know googke is desperate to control email but it won't happen.
I'd use the *hell* out of that snooze feature...
Now our corner office can't blame his secretary for not sifting through his emails correctly. It's the clouds fault!
Gmail already has some category thing that turned off when it came out with it. So they are re-releasing this, with more fain-fair this time?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
For plain-text email, once it passed through their machine you have lost your privacy. You gain no privacy or right-mindedness by not letting mail "stay" on their servers.
You would think that Google developers would recognize the importance of giving your product a name that is Googleable.
Almost every ISP you can sign up for in the USA, including all the big players like Comcast, provide email with your internet service.
You might not even need another provider, and certainly not google or microsoft.
Picking a different mail provider doesn't solve the NSA problem. End to end encryption solves the NSA problem, and you can use that regardless of who provides your email.
Unless you encrypt all your mail, and your correspondents do so as well, email is basically a post card. It matters not who your provider is, really. If you want to secure your own mail server, you'll need to run your own. It's far easier though, to get an S/MIME certificate and use that for sensitive emails with key correspondents and leave the spam and junk mail as is (plain text and readable). It's just a matter of benefit for effort.
My mindset is basically email is a post card, if I want to have privacy I put my message in an S/MIME envelope sealed with my recipient's public key.
WTF are those people doing in the video and what it has to do with the inbox?
Email users tend to fall into two distinct categories of usage; heavy and "guess I have to use email", and you can trace the distinction almost straight along generation gaps. From my experience, most of the heavy users of email tend to customize systems to what works best for them -- in my work at University IT, the heaviest users usually have very nuanced inboxes with dozed of folders and filters they constructed to suit their needs, disabling any and all auto-sorting for fear of missing an email. Our biggest complaint from users tends to come from the fear that we did something on our Google Apps for Education filter settings which is preventing email from reaching them (even though we run a "virtually" vanilla set up with our Google Apps domain).
The rest of the users just thrive in the chaos of an inbox and either reluctantly use the auto-sorting provided by Gmail or quickly search how to disable it. (The fuss when "Important" messages came into existence was absolutely balloons; users rightfully complained that they had no idea why there was a yellow indicator next to every message in their inbox, since the google filter was marking every message as important). Most people don't really get that much email, at least not the same way that Google seems to think. The inbox search is so good that many users just seem to be content remembering a few key words and then searching for the email when they need it. I constantly see inboxes with thousands of unread messages since the users just ignore any email they don't want to read.
Watching the video and reading the associated blog post, at best it looks like a dedicated app that does what the tabs already do, as well as a few extensions which monitor the contents of email. Some of the features, like the live flight updates, would probably be pretty cool, but I'm curious how well it can interpret itineraries that fly under other airlines for part of the itinerary. (e.g., last international flight I took was on Finnair, and I traveled American Airlines for part of the flight as part of the Oneworld flight alliance; so the actual AA flight was numbered differently than the Finnair listing as I received it, AA#### as opposed to AY###)
I really doubt that this is going to do anything except eat up more space on the Android default home screen as one of the many apps that phones have to ship with, but hopefully a few of the informational features will leak over to Gmail proper.
It seems like I'm going to get even more irrelevant spam than with email. GMail does a god job of keeping the important mail in the main tab.
But what the video is highlighting is "Promotion", "Purchases", "Social" (Sarah repinned your pin on Pinterest!, Miracles of modern science on Youtube!) and other "News".
All I'm seeing on that phone interface is just noise and spam, there's very little actual information.
I don't need more of that.
You can use GMail with IMAP too.
The law disagrees. Stored e-mail is different than e-mail that passes through a server.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm a longtime Gmail user. Google already has the kinky emails my wife and I exchange. So does the NSA, and I hope they're at least ducking into the men's room to wank.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
There are many, many, reasons not to trust Google.
This, however, is not one of them.
Required reading for internet skeptics
We know better than you how to organize your mail.
They can keep it.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I'm sending an email right now to cutegirlfriend@google.com
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The level of naysayers, resistance to change in Slashdot is the most I have seen in forever and I have been reading Slashdot for quite a while now.
Could you please, please, try it before saying that it is just like [insert failed google product here] or [insert very successful google product that you don't like here].
I know this is quite a culture shift for Slashdot, but sometimes it's too much.
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
That law only applies in the United States. Email is a bit more global.
That's good info, but they do push their annoying-as-fuck unneeded "improvements" by default. I'm tired of it - I've migrated my important email to Outlook.com now, and I'm sorting out my personal email now (harder to change as I search history more there than the financial stuff).
I've said it before on /., but I'll repeat it: Outlook.com doesn't suck. Gmail was the only sane answer 12 years ago, but my how times have changed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The NSA disagrees: all email ever sent is stored now, in their datacenters, next to the recordings of every voice call for the past decade. Your tax dollars at work..
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why not try doing like the US Postal Service has been doing for approximately the past 230 years? Put the damn mail in the users inbox and leave it the fuck alone! Don't try to sort it . . . don't try to organize it . . . and certainly don't open it to see what kind of other mail the recipient might like to receive!!!!!
Every time Google messes with Gmail, the interface gets worse. The Gmail product management needs to be flogged every time they try to be too clever. By now they're owed at least a dozen floggings.
not at all. the content of course is disclosed, that's just ok or else it would be encrypted.
however your use of the content is private matter too. that's as safe as it could be on local storage if using a respectful client. of course this includes also your full contact list, your habits, location and probably system and device information, if not more. this is inevitably leaked with any imaginable online client, and if you also choose gmail that's an explicit statement that privacy means shit to you. note: your's and your contact's.
just saying, not wanting to argue or playing right-minded. i just can't get used to the way people boldly dismiss this issue, as if it made it nonexistent. the fact that lots of people tend to do will have have far reaching impact on society, already has. people should be made aware, not misinformed. then they can do as they please, and of course take responsibility.
And what're they supposed to do? Set it to not improve by default? How does that even make sense? How is anyone going to discover new features?
Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions
Since this is slashdot, I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software. But I will say this: If software running on 1960's technology could get humans to the moon and back, it is not unreasonable for me to expect my phone to tell me how to get to ikea.
Man, when I read this kind of thing, I miss the days when I was using Pine in a terminal. No fluff, no crap, no nothing... Geez I'm getting old...
We must have the option of turning this stuff off. Google already does a fantastic job of keeping spam out of my inbox, and I unsubscribe from bulk emails I don't want. The result is that I get only a couple emails per day. I don't need fancy features to organize them as I just use search to find what I want. I'm sure this will help people with email clutter problems but I just like it the way it currently is. So please let me turn it off, just like Gmail's last attempt at automatic sorting.
This sounds like an April Fools joke. What's the date... October 22nd... Hmm... They've mixed up their calendar.
How can I make sure I don't miss their important response?!
You are right, that you retain the privacy of data beyond the message itself, I didn't think of that. When I think of Gmail, I think of Gmail the way I use it: as a server. I almost never use the web-interface because I dislike it (on top of the fact that I can't read my email in the web interface anyhow due to the encryption). I use a client almost exclusively.
I'm not in their demographic for their new product/service and hadn't really thought through other use-cases. That said, many (most) of my correspondents use Gmail so any unencrypted message of mine to or from them is stored and indexed by Google anyhow. That's why I feel local encryption is the best option for privacy.
Sort of. Gmail sort of kind of barely works with IMAP.
I admit I can't personally list the things that it doesn't do, but I know there has been discussion on the alpine mailing list many times in the past about how Gmail improperly (and purposely, from their end) follows the IMAP protocol.
12 years ago? Are you living in 2016?
Really? What year is this again? That train has sailed......come back to me when you're ready to roll something out that's production-ready and don't think that I'm all excited to do your beta testing anymore.
I'm probably just getting old, but what is up with all the youngsters these days always talking about how email is broken?
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