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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.
Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I have been using popfile to learn and file my emails for years so that the important ones rise to the top. I cannot imagine not having this. In the age of information overload, it is interesting that some people prefer not to offload this menial task to a computer.
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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!
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...
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?
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.
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.
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 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.