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Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox
An anonymous reader writes Three Inbox by Gmail engineers today answered questions as part of a Reddit AMA session. Most of the answers were tidbits we've heard of before, but one stood out to us: Google plans to eventually replace Gmail with Inbox. In response to the question "Do you think Inbox will replace Gmail on the long road?," lead designer Jason Cornwell gave the following answer: "In the short term, no. In the very long term, we hope so. Inbox is something new — that's why we're launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users, to which Cornwell replied: "They are not aimed at fundamentally different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users."
Ultimately, our users will decide.
We now have a new policy at Google!!!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox
Oh hellllllllllllllllllllllll, no!
Time to exclusively use Outlook... I like my emails just the way they are, thank you very much. I don't need some algorithm go through my emails and tell ME what IT thinks is important or not to me.
Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
As if the gmail auto threading wasn't bad enough at hiding things from you, now they will filter and what is important? (For advertising...) Why is it that every new upgrade seems like a kick to the groin lately?
Gripe about Google all you want, but GMail is a pretty solid product IMO. If they decide to replace it, they had better have *DAMN* good reason to do so, and they need to have the users on board with the change *BEFORE* they do it. Just talking about changing such a solid and deeply absorbed product makes my buttcheeks clench. If they screw it up it means lots of miserable people. I hope Google has seen the Windows H8 debacle and truly will listen to it's revenue-generating eyeballs (not customers, but drivers of ad revenue). Poking the eyeballs, well, in the eye, will hurt their bottom line just as badly as MS boldly going where their customers did not want them to go.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
What we found was that email works as a todo list for many people
Who exactly are these people? I've never seen a single person use email this way.
Well no, but you're the first second post. I hope that makes you feel good, down there in your mommy's basement.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Google
They even know they screwed it up when they went to tabs. I'm going to try inbox because I get emails all the time I want to delete later. "Offer of the week" emails I want to keep for the week, but delete after. I've never seen anything with a delayed delete, which inbox supposedly has. Or a reminder to delete, which is similar, but requires a click.
Learn to love Alaska
the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders
Interesting, I thought the most basic and oldest function of email was sending a message.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I don't have a gmail account, or a google account.
I use Seamonkey, and my ISP's email, and also have a domain with 1and1
Folders wouldn't work as well as tags for semantic data snarfing. Also it's one of those "competitive features" that they can rightly claim no other email client provides in the same way -- that it also totally effs up IMAP/POP folders and drags you to the web interface as much as possible is a bonus.
You can tell somebody at the Googleplex still smarting over the Wave debacle.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Folders weren't such a big loss if you used labels aggressively. I must have 200+ labels and they are cascaded like a directory structure and there are a lot of email handling rules associated with them.
As long as I label things (equivalent to routing it to a folder), then it is easily locatable.
So, I don't see this as such a big deal unless you can tell me what that doesn't give you the same quick-find capability and grouping.
The only respect that labels blow chunks is exportability. I don't know of any other mail client that would make use of the label data (if it even goes as part of an export) and thus if I ever leave gmail, I lose ALL of my filing unless I do a lot of selective/piece wise exporting. THAT is the one respect where labels blow chunks compared to folders.
On the other hand, the tabs and deciding what parts of my email was social or other or spamvertisments or links to goatse...... that was their plan, not mine. They kept routing things I wanted to see off into other tabs, so I actually had to switch tabs to see content I gave a crap about. How that was more efficient or effective, I could not fathom. So I disabled this piece of stupidity.
If they F up gmail, I'm done with them. Their attitude is to take things people have got working well and F them up for their own bizarre reasons. I have no idea how PO the customer is a valuable business strategy, but somehow Google seems to think that.
Except for the search engine and google maps (well until a few months go), I'm always amazed how shitty Google software tends to be... I can only imagine that the search engine is what's keeping it all together.
Maybe for simple minded people, folders are more like the office where mail can be filed away. GMail has something that's a vast improvement to that: labels. You can label your email the same way you would put it in a folder, but many emails will fit multiple labels and you can do that. Folders lack that flexibility.
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders
This might be an annoyance if you use the Gmail webclient but; K-9, Outlook and Thunderbird display all my labels as folders when connected to Gmail via IMAP, and I noticed in the webmail client you can make sub-labels too so I guess I always took 'Label' as Google-speak for 'Folder.'
So why not combine the two - have traditional folders and some rules that put email into the proper folder, with the option to apply searchable text tags (that's what labels are, after all) to group emails that are in different folders? It wouldn't have been all that hard ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
As an IMAP back end for a real email client.
#DeleteChrome
Dear Google,
Hi. My name is grasshoppa. You may know me from such famous threads as "Windows 8 Sucks" and "Windows 8 User Interface, wtf?". You may remember that I, along with a multitude of others, warned MS about making such a radical change to the desktop. No, wait, that's not quite right; we warned against FORCING such a radical change to the desktop. But we were assured by various astroturfers that windows 8 was the bees knees, the mutts nuts and various other wonderous bits of animals ( thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett, for that phrase ). We were called all sorts of various names for our opinions. Yet many of us stuck to our guns; we knew that a mobile interface force fed to desktop users was a recipe for failure.
Please. Listen to us now. This is a remarkable bad idea. This is the kind of idea your competitors DREAM of you implementing. It's really the only way they can get a foot hold into your market. And make no mistake; a foot hold will be all they need, because once you start down this road ( and, inevitably back track a week later due to overwhelming user criticism ), you have lost your momentum. You have lost the confidence necessary to stay that one step ahead of them. And they will then proceed to eat your lunch.
Who am I? No one really. Just some poor schmuck that will have to work with YOUR end users when you force feed them a UI change. And I'm already resentful for it.
So please. For the love of all you hold dear, PLEASE DO NOT FORCE A NEW INTERFACE on people.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What would be the point? It honestly doesn't seem like you've ever used Gmail's labels to understand how utterly redundant having folders would be.
When they start to force Inbox I will start migrating to Outlook.com. I can not stand using it i tried it for a week and just found myself damn annoyed with it. I have a working system for using my GMail and if they mess with it I'm gone as a user.
I'm terribly sorry that Google turned you down for that job.
I can see it has upset you greatly.
One word: hardlinks
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
That's a primary reason I stuck with Yahoo email for way too long: I didn't like the labeling system that Gmail provides as an alternative to folders. ("When all you have is a search engine hammer, everything looks like a search nail.") Finally, I decided to give in and use Gmail as my primary email service, labels and all. Why? Partly because Yahoo forced a new user interface on me that I didn't like, by shutting down the old version after initially allowing the old and new versions to coexist.
(Which makes Google's "Inbox" sound like deja vu all over again...)
I've tried Inbox a bit but haven't really given it a fair chance yet. My initial impression, though, is a bit negative: basically, it seems to be trying to solve a problem that I don't need solved. And with all the "improvements" it offers, it still doesn't even have folders...
Those who think they are the smartest (like you) are the stupidest (like you)..
The Google page just says that it will be good for me.
It looks generally like a dumbed down phone style app. "lots of whitespace" etc.
There is a *lot* of room for improvement in GMail that does not involve pissing about with the UI. Like being able to add a summary to an email thread. Like being able to break email threads which become muddled. Like being able to add additional meta data do emails and use them for simple applications. People have been asking for these for years, but the MBAs that now seem to run Google do not listen.
But it does not look like Inbox is any of these things,.
Anyone actually tried it?
+1. Labels an threads were the two great innovations that GMail introduced. But since then it has been dead.
Maybe for simple minded people, folders are more like the office where mail can be filed away. GMail has something that's a vast improvement to that: labels. You can label your email the same way you would put it in a folder, but many emails will fit multiple labels and you can do that. Folders lack that flexibility.
so, give me folders AND labels. duh.
I've used gmail since it was a baby, but at least I always used redirected emails that point there. So I can, in theory, switch out. I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
I know they hinted at it being some far future change, but just being willing to say it at all is nuts. Gmail is a smashing success, that they would want to redefine email based on some user interface study is scary as shit.
Labels are a great idea for light use, but trying to use labels for heavy use becomes unmanageable quite fast. I know people who have several thousand of folders. They can keep everything under control because the hierarchical nature of folders act like a visualization tool. They don't have to memorize how they organized everything, they just follow the hierarchy and look what's in there.
Basically, in the real world, the problem with labels is when people have more than an hundred of them, they simply forget what labels they created before, so they just create new labels to represent the same idea. They end up with "buyers", "consumers" and "shoppers", three labels for exactly the same thing. When they try to search for an old email, they use the last label they remember, but all the emails which were associated with another label are basically lost in the mailbox.
There are a lot of products that start off successfully, but then some bean counters or yahoos (Hey!) come along and improve it. Example: Thorlo Socks. They started off with some very nice, expensive sport socks. Recently I went to buy some, and now they have so many varieties of socks I can't find the damn original on their website.
Beware product improvement!
Seriously: do we use google products because they are great, or because they dominate the market?
Then I realised its landing page is one of those tablet only "Fullscreen picture! Scroll down you couch potato!" pages and closed the tab.
Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)
Feels bitter because you were not good enough to get hired?
... and see which one works better.
Before you force users looking for alternatives just because someone made a bad decision
Because labels are still stupid: if I delete something under one label, I don't necessarily want it deleted everywhere. But that isn't the interface on offer either - there's no "hardlink" style functionality.
I'm not in until I can switch clients and servers. My current IMAP system lets me use pretty much any email provider and any email client I want.Over the years, I've used several of each of those, and figure I'll have to keep switching once in a while.
Inbox pretty much locks me in to gmail and Inbox (or dial it back to a regular email client). That doesn't work for me, no matter what its features. Amongs which local backup seems to be missing.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I guess it is time to start paying for a mail account at a proper mail provider where i am the customer and not the product.
What is it with google and fucking up their product? Search has degraded noticeably over the past months, the new version of maps is buggy as fuck and worse than the first implementations of maps. Gmail is also constantly getting worse.
You know you are in trouble when fucking microsoft is designig better user interfaces than you (Tileworld and FULL CAPS OFFICE RIBBON MENU included)
Labels can be made hierarchical in Gmail.
In day to day use the only difference is that a mail (or more precisely, a conversation) can only be in one folder but can have multiple labels.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Then just remove the label you fuckwit
Labels can be hierarchical. Labels are available in a nice sorted drop down with autofilter as you type. Oh, and it understands sublables.
Have you actually used the product or are you making claims about what you think it does?
Disclaimer: I don't use web mail, for anything.
Threaded email pre-dates Gmail, it even predates Google. I've used threaded email clients since the early 1990s. Just because you haven't seen it before doesn't mean that Google 'invented' it. Oh, and applying threads to Webmail doesn't count as invention.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
You're doing it wrong. From the email, just click "Labels" and uncheck the label you want to remove, -or- (even easier) just click the "x" on the label itself. Done.
Back when I used Thunderbird in '04, I thought folders were awesome. When I started using gmail, it took me less than a month to realize that labels are 10x better than folders. Ten years later, there's no way I'd consider going back to Thunderbird.
Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)
Feels bitter because you were not good enough to get hired?
Who said he wasn't hired?
Inbox is even worse than the previous replacement of GTalk by Hangouts... Who would have guessed...
Sure, Usenet viewers used threading back in the 1990s.
But inventing something is nothing. Popularizing is everything. Until GMail ALL the major mail clients just used a nasty sent mail box. Thunderbird, Outlook, Lotus, Eudora, all of them.
Anthony
I've replaced Gmail with my own Linux email server. And I now have an anonymous login for Google services. I no longer trust that shit company.
I've really only been using gmail up to now because they were a reasonably good option for keeping my mailboxes relatively spam-free and viewing my mail on multiple devices. As my gmail box increasingly is filled up with inane chatter and low-quality job recruiters and they make it harder and harder to find relevant emails that I'm looking for, the more I'm inclined to move toward a different solution. I'd guess a lot of their customers use them simply because they're the least shitty option. It's kind of a bummer that a thirty-year-old glorified text editor seems to be a much better option than anything else that's out there. Perhaps I should experiment with synching my mailbox with git-annex and go back to using that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have found a very good job near where I live and I have simply "canceled" their hiring "process" in the middle. Imagine: dozens phone calls to organize dozens of "interviews", scattered around the world. I have stopped around 5th or 6th "interview", which was around 9-12 month into the "process". In other words, I wasn't hired by Google on technicality that I got bored waiting (and found good job ~20min walking distance from home!)
All in all, I was pretty surprised to find that the hiring process in Google is so badly organized and is so poor in communication. Just like any other other employer, they let you wait and dangle, but the difference that they need 4-12 times more interviews and 4-12 times more waiting and dangling for weeks and months.
That whole thing doesn't make sense, unless your goal specifically is the magic "Google" badge on your CV.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
But will it allow me to sort like Outlook does?
I want sorting AND searching. Their insistence on "searching is better" is really annoying.
Via the Web I hate it. It's slow as crap - has shitty formatting options etc. But gmail is much better over IMAP - then just use the client of your choice and you're good.
I hate the threading feature too. That takes much getting used to on their web product.
Not true. You could create rules that would automatically move sent email to different folders, depending on who the intended recipient was.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
.. or at least, it should be. It obviously has some nods to the methodology, like deferring actions for later.
What it needs is better context support, a proper 'tickler', and a full-featured API.
Now I can't say for sure how many people did move to G+. What I can absolutely say is that I'm not one of them. I used to use iGoogle and now I use My Yahoo. So instead of enjoying whatever metrics they used to gather from me and ads they now get nothing. Google+ is what it is and occasionally I look at it, but presently Google offer nothing which could be called a homepage and so I take my eyeballs elsewhere.
I have no idea what InBox is but the way it's being talked up would make me incredibly fearful of what could befall GMail. GMail is popular because it is online email with a nice GUI - nothing more, nothing less. It they replace it with some bullshit "stream", or a "network", or "social experience", or some glorified "wall", then they can fuck the hell straight off. Put that shit over in G+ where it belongs and don't even think of integrating or replacing GMail with it.
If you are using google for work email, I hope you have read the ToS: http://www.google.com/intl/en/...
This from Jason Cornwell, who decided to "allow" us to write shorter emails by "allowing" us to use a tiny little non-resizable compose window in Gmail.
Okay, that's not 100% true. You can switch to "full-screen" mode, which enlarges it to a size that is neither all of the screen nor even just all of the window. But it does "kindly" grey out all the GUI elements that the "full-screen" window isn't covering up and disallows you from interacting with them without minimizing the window.
But i guess it make senses. If he can just make Gmail unappealing enough then of course we'll all switch to Inbox, right?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That would be nice, though it doesn't seem like how Google usually works... I can think of several instances where Google decided it knew best, rolled out changes to products that made them slower and crappier, and said, "you'll love this, so we made the changes mandatory!" I can only think of a single instance (the new Maps a few months ago) where they gave something an overhaul that left it cripplingly slow and which removed several key features, and provided us the option to go back to permanently still using the old one that worked better (actually permanently, I hope...)
Reminds me of a story from The Dilbert Principle, about an office that provided free drinks of various kinds, but then decided nominally as an experiment, but actually as a cost-cutting measure, to not buy new drinks until all the drinks had been drank. The "experiment" "proved" that everyone liked the unpopular flavors, as they got drank (once everything else was gone).
Since when does "hope so" turn into them actually doing it?
Can I please just keep my email, please? I don't want your filters, I don't want you telling me that I've got ten minutes to board a plane as I already sodding know this. Whenever anyone tries to apply an algorithm to my data they manage to hide the things I care about and show me nothing but the bullshit I can't stand. Does this really have to be the fate of my email, as well?
Anyone?
because people don't get paid for not "working". Same thing with Microsoft and whomever else. They constantly fuck shit up because new is better even if it isn't.
You could just remove the label you no longer want applied to the message. That works quite well.
I've tried Inbox. It's as shit as every other attempt to hide away emails in favour of highlighting what it thinks is important.
Force this on users, and I'll finally, permanently switch my email provider.
It doesn't have a delayed delete. It has a snooze feature which hides an email until a specific date and time or location such as snooze until you get home.
"We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide."
I call bullshit, based on the way they treated Gmail users with their awful "new compose" interface that they rammed down everyone's throat, despite the many, many users who had repeatedly resisted moving to it every time it was "suggested" to them, and some 24 year old Silicon Valley hipsters decided they knew better than everyone else and that we'd just grow to like it if we'd use it. I can't speak for everyone else, but I still hate it, and I suspect I'll hate Inbox just as much. Based on my participation in and reading of Google's own product forums re: the "New Compose" and other bugs or issues, it is also apparent to me that Google doesn't even listen to their own volunteer shills there, much less the actual users. I have never once, that I knew of, seen a response from an actual Google employee to a complaint about a product of theirs. Ultimately, they'll do whatever the hell the latest batch of "The-ink-may-still-be-wet-on-my-diploma-but-I-know-more-about-computing-than-everyone-else" CS majors decide they think is "cool" and justifies them keeping their jobs by being "innovative" and "progressive" and following the latest trend, whatever it may be.
For me, same thing. I'll delete the movie deal of the week when it pops up out of date.
Between now and then, if I go to the movies, I'll search for "movie" and it'll be at the top of the list. Or something like that.
Learn to love Alaska
Yes and that is what I did. But it is not easy, and 99% of users just used sent mail. And even when done it does not group related messages. So no, not close to the GMail threading.
I actually do not think that there was a single widely used EMail system that supported threading in the way No News did.
What is sad is that labels and threading are the type of features added by smart engineers in small teams, which is what GMail would have been long ago. But it is not the sort of thing that the MBAs that run large teams would do. They do cost benefit analysis, end user surveys, study the in flight magazines and thereby attempt to create a faster horse. Hence all the changes to GMail in the last 10 years are cosmetic rubbish following fashions, often making the actual email harder to read (e.g. picking apart long threads). Products generally have a short initial innovative phase, and then if they are successful they are squashed by management.
I think that whatever Inbox turns out to be it will be the end of GMail for me.
"The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users"
I must have a different definition of casual and power user.
Sounds like what my brother went through. I don't know why employment at Google is so prized. For as many hoops as they make you jump through, it sure seems to have done fuck all for the quality of their software.
My first hands-on experience was with Checkout. What I found there was an incredibly disjointed documentation and a just barely functional sandbox. Of course, right after I had it sort of working, Google pulled the rug out from under me. But wait, I can start over with Wallet? Fuck that, I'll put up with Paypal.
Later, I decided I was going to write a simple Android app. Again, there's a barely functional cocktail of tools needed to develop on Windows. Again, the documentation is disjointed or wrong. And, what's this, you don't have real database drivers so I need to do SOAP over HTTP instead? Fuck that, I'll buy a Surface.
But, you know, it's the same story as Mozilla. Waah MS update treadmill waah. Then 17 versions of Firefox come out in 6 months and each one triggers some kind of plugin update or feature removal in between shifting the UI all over the place again because reasons.
Labels can be made hierarchical in Gmail.
In day to day use the only difference is that a mail (or more precisely, a conversation) can only be in one folder but can have multiple labels.
That's pure bullshit. "Copy to Folder..." duplicates any email you want to any folder however nested that folder is (or not, copy to the inbox, Thunderbird doesn't give a shit). If "Google" wanted to innovate, maybe they could do an alias-like (or shortcut) copy instead to save space.
Learn computers. I can trivially put every new email into every folder I have. More so, I can configure my client to do this automatically and forward that email to other addresses.
Maybe google wants something where the user doesn't have to create nested folders (Customer-[A-C][D-G][...]) or where they decide when it is necessary. Don't know.
Regardless, please learn computers then come back here.
email is a productivity tool. Inbox is not. only 5 emails fit on my screen, the rest is bloat, whitespace and features that are cool at first, but I don't use them anymore after 2 days...
Right?
First of all, why didn't they include the ability to read or send messages to/from accounts other than Gmail, like Gmail currently lets you do now? Second, how is Inbox able to fill in blank avatars from business email addresses with company logos? Is it getting help from Chrome or something? Nice feature though, just wonder how it works.
I know sufficient about computers.
You, however, fail at reading. I was saying that in day to day the difference isn't all that big. You confirmed it.
You also missed that labels CAN be nested. Google's employees don't think that nesting is foolish (or maybe they don't think that anymore) because they have purposefully build it to work.
By the way:
Copy to folder does exactly that. It copies the mail to the folder. Different beast for search engines. In Google you can search for multiple labels (IE "label:customers label:todo"). Can you search for mails that have copies in different folders?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I was saying that in day to day the difference isn't all that big.
Err, but you also said:
In day to day use the only difference is that a mail (or more precisely, a conversation) can only be in one folder but can have multiple labels.
Which is false. Whether or not the difference is big or not, I see some inconsistency in your opinion.
You also missed that labels CAN be nested. Google's employees don't think that nesting is foolish (or maybe they don't think that anymore) because they have purposefully build it to work.
No, I even suggested that Google wants to possibly do this automatically:
Maybe google wants something where the user doesn't have to create nested folders (Customer-[A-C][D-G][...]) or where they decide when it is necessary.
Now, I'm not a file system or PC or computer expert, but it seems to be me that "Labels" are just a useless wheel re-invention. I thought the alias was neat-o in the mid 90s, fwiw. "Labels" is not unlike MSFT reinventing its file system nearly every OS upgrade. With few exceptions - like multi-user support - these are not improvements but a constant re-mapping without reason. I suspect they believe that if they tackle the task of organizing a user's information, they will have a lock on that customer. Of course I'm a guy who turns off autocomplete in spreadsheets due to too many false completions. If I planned to type the same shit over and over, there are faster ways - typically - than autocomplete.
Anyway, you got caught talking up labels like they are something neat-o when it is just a different name for some file system meta data or whatnot.
In Google you can search for multiple labels (IE "label:customers label:todo"). Can you search for mails that have copies in different folders?
Yes, you can. But for what you are getting at, you might want "Tags" which Thunderbird uses. It's kind of like a label but without the pretense of being a folder.