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Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization

Posted by Soulskill on from the will-be-in-beta-for-the-next-eight-years dept.

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.

38 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. More changes I don't want ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:More changes I don't want ... by blackjackshellac · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, considering how badly they fucked up Google Maps, I think you're right to be cautious.

      --
      Salut,

      Jacques

    2. Re:More changes I don't want ... by Sowelu · · Score: 2

      I was going to agree that email was fine twenty years ago, but I do kind of like the way modern webmail displays threads even if it screws with the paradigm a bit. God, could they possibly have picked worse terminology for this new stuff though. I'll probably avoid it as long as I can.

    3. Re:More changes I don't want ... by pushing-robot · · Score: 4, Funny

      Sorry, I don't understand. Did you mean you'll snooze it ?

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    4. Re:More changes I don't want ... by halivar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't see any reason to eschew experimentation simply for the sake of familiarity. The old inbox will always be around; if not at Google, then at a competitor. You lose nothing. And for every hundred failed ideas, there's one gem that changes how we think about something forever.

    5. Re:More changes I don't want ... by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One could thread messages before webmail if one's mail client had support for it. Hell, Usenet and Fidonet clients could thread messages, as could public message boards. That technology dates back to the dawn of the personal computer, and may well have existed on big-iron machines before that.

      That's kind of what pisses me off about modern "innovation", it's reimplementing something that already existed, much of the time, and trying to call it novel or new. There are very few legitimate new technologies these days.

      Even when they're going on about VPC and being able to spawn apps, that's just X Consortium all over again. From 1984.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    6. Re:More changes I don't want ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oh Gods, yes. The new maps is an abomination. It drives me insane. It's so SLOOOOW, that huge top-left info box which obscures way too much and keeps flapping up and down, the inability to show transport links AND your searched for items... how the hell are people using it? it's a symptom, though, of Google having become detached from its end-users.

      I use the old maps - there's a URL for them still;

      https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic

    7. Re:More changes I don't want ... by safetyinnumbers · · Score: 3, Informative

      It wasn't threading, it was displaying a thread as one scrollable page that was the innovation. I'd not seen a newsreader or mail client that did that before. Combined with collapsing of quoted text (which was an old idea, I think it was in Eudora or Xnews or something, at least), it's an easier way to read through a thread, removing one level of navigation (paging through messages merged with scrolling down a single message).

    8. Re:More changes I don't want ... by jfengel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes, but they're not improving it, and the new Maps doesn't seem to be replacing the features of Classic Maps that I really liked. Any interface needs improvement, and while I like the older interface, its failures become more grating over time.

    9. Re:More changes I don't want ... by SeaFox · · Score: 2

      I'd be just as happy if they'd leave gmail alone. It was fine years ago without all the ****.

      You could also just set up your Gmail in a normal email client and then not be effected by the whims of the UI designers/marketing department. It will stay the same on your side.

    10. Re:More changes I don't want ... by afgam28 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      1. UI innovations are still innovative, even if the underlying technology has been around for a while.

      2. There are no existing email clients that bundle semantically similar emails and extract relevant highlights. Even if you're not impressed with the ui there is still a lot of interesting machine learning behind this.

    11. Re:More changes I don't want ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      1. Some of us define innovation as novel improvements. Implementing something that already exists isn't innovative. Coming up with the initial idea was the innovative part. Incremental improvements aren't innovation, no matter what marketing says.
      2. Incorrect.
      2a) Bundling: Custom rule based or sorting by specific things (both of which are supported by every modern email client). Also spam flagging. 2b) Extracting: Outlook extracts dates and times and recommends creating calendar events. Thunderbird highlights media content. Every client I've seen provides some sort of email summary. Google is making that summary slightly smarter, something I don't want. I'd much rather people wrote the most important bit on the first line rather than wasting it with a useless greeting. I already know you're talking to me because you sent the email to me. I also know who sent it because you're in the 'from' field. Signatures are a waste of space, more people should use vCards. Back on topic, a smarter summary will likely miss some important aspect of the email due to limited display space, leading to more confusion from the people who will begin the rely on this system instead of actually reading the email.

  2. It begins again by blueshift_1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... now we get to see comments everywhere flooded with "Can I haz invite code, plz. user@genericdomain.com kthx"

    1. Re:It begins again by Nimey · · Score: 2, Funny

      a/s/l?

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
  3. No Fuckign Thanks by sexconker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It combines the worst of mobile, email, and social.
    At least they're not injecting it into Gmail like all their previous attempts... ...yet.

    1. Re:No Fuckign Thanks by eneville · · Score: 2

      Agreed. After I don't know how long I've been using email, both GUI and CLI clients, I've found the only feasible way to do it without clutter is to use mutt. When something stupid comes in that can only be read with a HTML client as it has no text/plain part I can funnel it through lynx. I've not found any web client to help at all helpful when it comes to processing a mail inbox. Sorry, call me grumpy but snooze feature is no different to me setting a flag. I'll be surprised if anything beats mutt this decade.

      --
      Why UNIX?
  4. You have slashdotted an inbox by MerlynEmrys67 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  5. oh fuck no ! ! ! by jordanjay29 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:This looks a lot like what Microsoft is doing. by sexconker · · Score: 2

    Gmail had a similar thing (though as with many features, Hotmail had it first), I think they called theirs "Priority Inbox", which covered both the actual priority inbox as well as all the other social/travel/etc. filtered inbox views. Like you, I immediately switched it off. The only one I can tolerate is Hotmail's "Active View". It's useful enough to warrant existing and innocuous enough to not warrant me trying to turn it off.

  7. Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Hmmm ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I used google wave as it was intended. In fact, seeing it work as intended was one of the coolest things ever, and that's why they kept a lot of its features and incorporated them into google docs. We used wave to plan a camping trip with about 20 people. 20 people all working at the same time on a single document, adding things to "buy" lists, getting contact information, editing errors, putting confirmation numbers, adding/removing what each person was able to bring or was responsible for, etc. It was incredibly collaborative and brilliantly simple to use. Sadly I don't think most folks used it like that, or got to experience it. As it stands now, google docs almost completely implements what was there, so at least that functionality still works.

    2. Re:Hmmm ... by halivar · · Score: 2

      It was what it was: a proof of concept; spaghetti thrown at the wall to see if it sticks. The ideas in Google Wave have been incorporated into a bunch of stuff all over the net, from G+ to Facebook and elsewhere.

  8. Mail inbox@google.com to opt in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can I mail outbox@google.com to opt out?

  9. Still try to do proprietary email? by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Still try to do proprietary email? by Kazoo+the+Clown · · Score: 2

      I wish we could say the same about social networking and get it out of the hands of Facebook...

    2. Re:Still try to do proprietary email? by narcc · · Score: 2

      There isn't a good reason why social networking couldn't function more like email, with multiple providers inter-operating over some standard protocol. There just isn't as much money in it for the big players to be interested.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    3. Re:Still try to do proprietary email? by Voyager529 · · Score: 2

      Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though?

      Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it; .mint and .ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but most of it ends up in inactive groups and is generally recognizable. Conversely, much of the spamming seems to have subsided - with the relatively small number of people using it in comparison to Facebook or Kik messenger, and those that do being the kinds of people who are going to be able to download and configure Pan or Agent and find a Usenet provider, the 'intelligence floor' for getting in is generally higher than the 'gullibility ceiling' required for a spam campaign to be terribly useful.

  10. Re:Automated digesting by scubamage · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Excuse me Dave, but the crown prince of Nigeria requires your assistance immediately. Also, there is a marked amount of concern about your penis size, you may wish to speak with a medical professional."

  11. Re:Make it a plugin for local mail clients by praxis · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Re:A better alternative? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:Automated digesting by nine-times · · Score: 2

    Actually, I'd like to see better methods of processing/digesting email, but not for personal email.

    My work email is flooded with all kinds of junk, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to improve that. I get a bunch of ads that I wouldn't necessarily call "spam", but their ads. I actually want to get some of them (they're sometimes relevant to my job), but it's always super-low priority. I also get copied on a bunch of stuff that I might want to look at, often don't really need to, but that I do want to keep a record of the exchange in my email.

    I also get automated notifications for certain kinds of things which could stand to have automated intelligent processing. For example, I might have an automated alert set to email me when a server isn't responding to a ping, and I *do* want to see that. However, if the server's internet connection goes flaky overnight, I might end up with 80 messages saying, "Error: server.domain.com is offline", and then a little while later, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online". It'd be nice to have all of those rolled up into a email digest that says, "You received a flood of messages with similar subjects. Here is a list of them, in order." I don't know practically how you'd do that, but I wouldn't mind if someone were to figure that out. Considering how much spam still gets through my spam filters, I don't expect a solution anytime soon.

    Anyway, my only point here is that there are improvements that could be made.

  14. Re:As if we needed by Lilith's+Heart-shape · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

  15. I read that as by Torp · · Score: 2

    We know better than you how to organize your mail.
    They can keep it.

    --
    I apologize for the lack of a signature.
  16. Why do I still read these comments by Mikelikus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  17. Re:oh fuck no ! ! ! by lgw · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
  18. Sigh! by jason.sweet · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Sigh! by Sloppy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.

      You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.

      Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"

      Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"

      Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  19. Requested Invite but my email is a mess! by dasacc22 · · Score: 2

    How can I make sure I don't miss their important response?!