Email overload? Try Priority Inbox | Hacker News Reader

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

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280 pointsniyazpk112 comments

This will make me very, very happy. It matches almost exactly with my workflow for using email: certain people (customers) get written back as soon as I check email, other people get responses as time permits, and then I get some notifications which I don't typically act on but do appreciate having surfaced somewhere (e.g. "You sold something" or "Here's your receipt.").

Stuart Roseman's startup SaneBox already does something similar - http://www.sanebox.com. As a paid service, I guess they are in for some competition.

This sort of feature always makes me sad that they announce features before rolling them out to everyone. Now I can't wait for it to show up in my account.

I can't agree more. I was really disappointed when found out that I need to wait for release. Most likely I'll forgot unless it will appear on top of HN next week.

They announce this sort of thing as "New Features" in the GMail interface itself. So you don't need HN to remind you.

Yeah, I really with this was a google labs feature so I could try it out right now. Although the fact that it is not a lab feature means they are taking it quite seriously.

It should be along shortly, if not already. I've got it in my personal gmail account and my apps account.

#28 of YC's Ideas They'd Like to Fund

"Fixing email overload. A lot of people, including me, feel they get too much email. A solution would find a ready market. But the best solution may not be anything as obvious as a new mail reader.

Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it."

Isn't Etacts trying to solve this problem?

Yeah, I was trying to solve that as well with my startup... Priority Inbox definitely implements a few of our "killer features". Will be interesting to see if we can compete with Google on this :)

Have you thought what your next startup is going to be about? :-P

I was actually already using my inbox as todo list with the Multiple Inboxes lab feature, using labels "Need Reply" or "To Do" for the emails and use filters to address them to the multiple inboxes.

I wish the shortcut keys (such as j and k) would reach down into the multiple inboxes. Unfortunately they only work on the top inbox.

Similar here. Second inbox is mailing lists, third is "other crap" - newsletters, email from Facebook, etc. - the kind of thing that I want to have available, but don't want to see most of the time.

I've been using Priority Inbox for the last few days. I don't know how I managed my email without it.

That promotional video is exceptionally well-executed.

Wish I could watch it. Am I the only one who can't stream a full video from YouTube half the time? Either it doesn't start at all, or quits streaming half way through.

This is at least half of my youtube experience.

I get a lot of stuttering due to Youtube throttling bandwidth usage at the server end. Videos start great, but after that initial buffer is done with, it often inches forward too slowly to keep up with the playback rate.

When this happens, and I really want to watch the video, I use FlashGot in Firefox to download the FLV directly and play it back in Media Player Classic.

This may not help your particular situation, but I'd urge you to try VLC (http://videolan.org/) since it has awesome support for playing YouTube videos. It requires that you paste the YouTube URL into its "Open Network Stream" dialog, but is otherwise painless.

Almost anything has to be better than using Media Player Classic.

MPC works wonderfully though. I hope you're not confusing it with Microsofts version.

VLC's user interface sucks, which is why I use MPC. Anything to avoid WMP.

In particular, adjusting zoom, aspect ratio, clipping area etc. with MPC, with the numeric keypad, is completely trivial, but a major pain in the neck with VLC. (E.g. how do you zoom to 102%? To 94%? How do you crop the top 8 pixels, because there's fuzz from overscan there?)

And keyboard shortcuts! Alt-Enter is nice and simple to use with MPC. With VLC, F11 goes full screen but still leaves control gunk visible; Ctrl+H removes the gunk, but - believe it or not - also disables F11! In full screen (F11) and controls hidden with Ctrl+H, it's surprisingly awkward to get back out again. Yes, you can use the "other" full screen by double-clicking with the mouse, but at that point it's clear that it's already lost.

You could always use an add-on to download the video files.

I'm a fan of Video DownloadHelper - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006/ for firefox.

It usually works for any website that embeds media into flash.

Having tested this the last few days, I would raise a rebel army if Google tried to take it away.

Gmail is starting to remind me more and more why I like free software so much: I want the ability to hack it to do what I want. The feature I'm desperate for is to have it use specific email addresses with specific people: dedasys.com for most correspondence, gmail with family, maybe hecl.org for that mailing list, and so on. Sure you can change it manually, but it's a pain in the neck.

The reason I don't run my own email any more though, is that the real killer feature of gmail is the spam detection. That makes me willing to put up with their control of my mail.

I'm not sure if this is identical to Gmail's filtering, but Google has SaaS spam filtering:

http://www.google.com/postini/email.html

I used to work at a local ISP that outsourced spam filtering to Postini (before it was aquired by Google). It was a really impressive service at the time, and I imagine it's improved since then.

At least Gmail, unlike Yahoo Mail (which I’m currently stuck with), allows free POP and IMAP access. If Gmail doesn’t support something, you can hook whatever email client you want to it. There is probably an open-source mail program you can write a plugin for to do what you want.

Why not pay the $20 or whatever fee for Yahoo Gold and have it forward for you? Then you can switch to a different service, Gmail if you wanted. You'd probably be a lot happier in the long run if managing your email is a pain right now. And Gmail can forward your stuff for free.

You can switch to Yahoo Asia to forward e-mail for free.

I think it is possible for you to do this. Greasemonkey for Firefox allows you to run Javascript that modifies the way pages work. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/

Actually, I found a script that claims to do exactly what you need! http://userscripts.org./scripts/show/71859 It says you have to edit the source to change which emails go where, but it seems much better than nothing.

Thunderbird + the "Virtual Identity" addon lets you do that

This goes a few steps past just reading keywords out of my emails to place ads. This requires Gmail to have intimate knowledge of my emailing habits. While from the software point of view this is not scary, the "profile" data has to be stored someplace other then my machine and it makes me wonder who can read it. Will Google have to surrender my psychological profile upon a subpoena? This is sarcastic, but a real concern. Even if I somehow am magicked into trusting Google, no amount of magic will allow me to trust the government, and anything Google knows, the government has right to.

"the data has to be stored someplace other then my machine and it makes me wonder who can read it"

Data being stored someplace other than your machine is the reason why people use webmail.

I think he meant the "psychological profile" data, not his email text.

Without knowing anything detailed about how all this is implemented, it looks to be derived from nothing more than is stored in your inbox:

The text of the emails, and whether they are read and replied to.

As such it seems like strictly less information than you are requesting that they store.

In the presentation they say that it's partially based on what E-Mails you read. So they're tracking more than just the information in your inbox, they're also considering how you use your inbox through the GMail web interface.

I'd be surprised if this kind of data wasn't already tracked.

Oh yes, Google has explicitly stated that they track stuff like this. I was just replying to the "it looks to be derived from nothing more than is stored in your inbox" comment by moultano. Which is obviously incorrect, and Google even states so in their introduction video.

It'd be interesting to what degree using GMail over IMAP v.s. over the GMail web interface affects the heuristics of this new feature.

The read/unread state of each email is obviously stored to construct the ui. That seems like data you are already asking them to store.

There will almost inevitably eventually be an enterprising district attorney who uses "The defendant's computer is configured to automatically prioritize his email by his interests. We obtained a warrant for, and received, the contents of the defendant's inbox. The subject line of his most important email of the day: Lurid Kiddie Porn."

It will probably be used against someone who actually has bona fide interest in child pornography. Probably.

After all, cache contents and network logs are used to help convict people all of the time. Most of them are factually guilty, but the legal system probably does not see eye to eye with technically inclined members of this audience as to whether cache contents mean that someone intended or attempted to view the cached content.

I hope that this improves their false-positive rate for identifying spam. If a message is borderline, I wouldn't mind it receiving a "low priority" tag instead of being auto-junked. My personal messages are usually classified correctly, but I need explicit filters to save Git and Boost mailing list messages from the spam folder. As a result, actual spam messages that were correctly labelled "spam" are archived instead of deleted, and I still waste time deleting scams and shams.

Ironic considering Eric Schmidt disputed the existence of communication overload fairly recently.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-...

Perhaps because he's been dogfooding Priority Inbox? :)

Counter-productive byproduct: I'm gonna be checking my email until I see that alert come up...

This is gonna send shockwaves through the email marketing industry.

I believe it will have an impact on the email marketing industry. I can see lots of marketer getting worried. I think however that it will have the worst impact on companies that use their lists in a way that annoy users.

If you simply offer a useful service (and I believe I do with the recently launched http://anynewbooks.com) I don't think you are going to be terribly impacted. People will always open emails that they find valuable whether they are newsletters or not.

If all you offer is low quality bacn though, you're going to hate this new Gmail feature.

If you annoy people, chances are that you'll end up in their spam filters anyway. This is for the kind of stuff that people leave in their inboxes to read later (or, if they're organized, auto-forward to some "read later" folder).

Perhaps 'annoy' was too strong of a term. What I meant was the kind of emails that barely interest your users enough not to mark them as spam. Low quality bacn.

What I'm saying is that it's not the death of newsletters. This new feature is really useful and its negative impact on permission based marketing can be reduced by ensuring that the content you send out is really appealing to your users. Which is a win-win situation, because more appealing content usually leads to more conversions.

A high open rate may mean that your newsletter ends up in the high priority inbox for a decent percentage of your user-base, despite being a newsletter (unless Google automatically excludes newsletters).

How long until Google monetizes Priority status?

I run GTD-like system and I am not immediately attracted to this. To me, an email either "requires action" or is "done". Obviously, a lot of stuff goes directly into done (receipts etc.), but I would not trust automation with that I think..

I've been doing this sort of thing ever since they introduced the Multiple Inboxes lab feature. It wasn't Gmail's logic, it was my own in a series of complex filters. Here's a screen grab from February 2009: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/3257013239/sizes/o...

Yeah, I've been doing something similar myself as well http://cl.ly/96b0317654f02721b1bd

I just use a couple extra tags and filter certain messages to them, archiving them immediately. I only have this for my mailing lists right now, though.

Well, that kills my idea of creating a commercial service based on my fast classifier to do automatic labeling of messages in GMail.

No it doesn't. You just need to execute better than Google did. For instance, why have 3 classes ("normal", "bacn", and "spam"), why not have 7 or 8 categories instead? How about a better tool for training the classifier so it conforms to your own use? Competition is HARDER when Google gets in the mix, but it doesn't mean you have to give up!

You are right. And what I want to do is automatically label the email in arbitrary ways just like POPFile does. Hmm. Maybe I really should work on this since it would work for anyone who has an IMAP accessible account.

This is a BRILLIANT feature that I hope stimulates somebody on HN to build around Outlook.

GMAIL hovers around 5% of email client usage.

Outlook still owns somewhere between 35 - 43%.

MSFT was moving in this direction and had a decent solution out a few years back called Email Prioritizer.

Of course, they tossed before it made it out of labs.

Xobni is too complex IMO, what's so compelling about Google's system is how simple it is - it just works, it fits right in. Nice job.

http://www.officelabs.com/projects/emailprioritizer/Pages/De...

http://visibleranking.com/2010/05/most-popular-email-clients...

Yep - their implementation looks great (at least at first glance).

I think Gmail has much more than 5% of the market. It may be that Outlook is installed on 35-45% of all computers, but nobody currently has numbers for the use of the application. If I can get away with it, I prefer forwarding mails so I don't have to deal with Outlook.

And so should all sane companies: Outlook waste their time.

GMail isn't even that popular for webmail. It's just that it's insanely popular among the tech types.

1) The parent's link indicated that this is real usage data, from Campaign Monitor. CM and similar use tracking pixels, and can detect what client is being used to open the email.

2) I use Outlook all the time, as do many people I work with. Gmail is great for webmail, but its not a replacement for Outlook, especially if you rely heavily on contacts, calendar, tasks, or search.

Gmail is great for webmail, but its not a replacement for Outlook, especially if you rely heavily on contacts, calendar, tasks, or search.

Really? I find Google Apps to be better in all four of those categories, especially search. What makes Outlook superior in those categories?

Outlook's market share isn't directly correlated to its capabilities. Many large organizations force their employees to use Outlook as their corporate standard.

Outlook searches within attachments. GMail doesn't.

I work from multiple locations often, having my contacts, emails, calendar and tasks available from any location is very important to me. The only feature in which I think gmail is lacking/lagging behind is the tasks one.

I've tried using synchronization tools before but they often deal with only one aspect at a time and do so rather poorly (last time I checked, about 1 and a half year ago)

GMail didn't support delegation or folder sharing last time I checked. Those are important requirements for many organisations.

This new feature GMail have announced is trivial and unimportant compared to many other features they could release.

If you're downvoting because you disagree, at least explain why. The lack of folder sharing and delegation would both be show stoppers if my organisation was considering moving to GMail.

This new auto-filtering mechanism wouldn't even make it on to the interesting features list, let alone the desirable or required lists.

I think HNers generally disagree with your statement:

This new feature GMail have announced is trivial and unimportant compared to many other features they could release.

The gmail team is not known for adding trivial or unimportant features. They probably deserve more credit than you are giving them.

Also, I'm not sure how delegation and folder sharing are related to email. Perhaps you could elaborate?

We have to disagree on the importance of this latest feature then.

Folder sharing: User A gives read or read/write access on one of their email folders to user B. I don't think I've ever used a mail service which doesn't support this simple long standing feature of email.

Delegation: User A delegates permission to user B to organise events in their Calendar, or to send mail on their behalf.

Delegation is very useful for people with secretaries or PAs. Folder sharing is very useful for people working in teams or all kinds.

I have absolutely no desire to give anyone else access to my email, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the case for many other users as well. I do want the ability to send mail as another person (I have some 10-odd email accounts), but Gmail already handles that.

While this new feature may not be useful for corporate users, that doesn't mean it's not useful for users in general.

I have absolutely no desire to send mail as another person, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the case for many other users as well. I do want the ability so share mail folders with other people, and GMail doesn't handle that.

While this new feature may be useful for some users, that doesn't mean it's useful for users in general.

What fraction of users actually want folder sharing?

I've personally been using email since 1992, and I've never once used such a feature, nor has anyone asked me to use it. This is despite my having worked on a fair number of very productive teams.

Now I don't know how you personally use it. But I'm fairly sure that if I looked at your desired workflow using it, I could find another that was equally effective that didn't use it. Better yet, my alternative would be much more convenient for any software developers who don't happen to be working in a Windows environment.

> "What fraction of users actually want folder sharing?"

How on Earth would I know that?

We use folder sharing extensively at the University I work at. We have a folder structure which is shared by all staff which we call the Archive. People move email into the Archive which is owned by their role and which needs to be kept and shared with others. So you've never used folder sharing? I can show you several thousand people who have...

The ACL extension for IMAP looks as though it came out about 13 years ago!

> "Now I don't know how you personally use it. But I'm fairly sure that if I looked at your desired workflow using it, I could find another that was equally effective that didn't use it."

You know you could find a better workflow than the one I'm using, even though you don't know what I'm doing? magic.

> "Better yet, my alternative would be much more convenient for any software developers who don't happen to be working in a Windows environment."

The above makes no sense whatsoever and proves you completely missed the point. This isn't a Windows feature. I'm using it from Thunderbird on an OSX box right now, connecting to Dovecot IMAP server on a Linux box. Courier IMAP also supports it, as does Exchange and CommuniGate Pro, Cyrus and most open source webmail applications and email clients...

GMail doesn't support the IMAP ACL extension, nor does the webmail interface support any sort of sharing. That is a severe limitation.

Gmail does have delegation for apps users. It looks like it's only available for 'premiere' accounts, but that makes some sense when you think about who's likely to make use of it.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...

That's good to know.

So Campaign Monitor is a email marketing tool. Gmail excels at segregating unsolicited marketing into a folder called "spam". So when I don't open those emails it makes Google look like a smaller proportion than those email clients that don't filter so well. Also, by default gmail does not open graphics (like tracking pixels) when opening a message.

--just say'n

Don't know if it still does it but ClearContext use to provide this exact solution for Outlook. It prioritized your Inbox based people and e-mails that you haven't responded to yet.

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/contacts.html

The product seems to have chased off into GTD-land, but the sort of the Inbox was really useful.

Hi, I'm the CEO of ClearContext. We have focused the last couple of years on including this type of functionality as part of our project management product, but we plan to release a simple free product for Outlook users focused just on identifying your most important messages. We'll start beta-testing that product this month.

Xobni doesn't claim to solve the mailbox triage problem. That's a really hard problem.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=xobni+...

That's almost a direct quote from Adam Smith's mouth from a talk he gave at MIT startup bootcamp. I don't have the link to the video at hand, but I distinctly remember him saying, with a pause for emphasis, "Xobni does not solve the email triage problem."

I understand you worked at Xobni, so I cede that you probably know more than I do. Either way, that was the message he was trying to send.

I need this to be integrated with the filters they already have.

For example, when my dad forwards me every joke that's ever been forwarded to him over the last 24 hours, I don't want them cluttering up my important emails. However, if he actually writes something (rare, but occasionally happens), than that's important. Integrating this with the filters would allow me to use the FWD: and FW: subject line tags to segregate his important vs his non-important emails.

I've had a similar feature (without the training part) in GMail for a while now. GMail Labs has a feature called something like "Multi Inbox". It shows other searches/labels of your choice on the front page. I set it up to show Drafts, Starred and a "To Do" label and have been running a system much like this shows, just prioritizing stuff on the fly. Given you can see drafts and such stuff, this might even be a better alternative for some.

Interesting. People who actively use Multiple Inbox lab in GMail usually have the same or similar configuration. (Starred, Drafts and label:toread for incoming links — that's mine).

Looks like a pattern.

Anyone know who made that video?

Was wondering same thing, it was very well done.

I'm guessing it's internal, put together by Google people on their 20% hours.

Technical people can be creative, too! At least, that's what I'd like to think.

I'm guessing it's internal, but made one of their marketing teams. (http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/advertising/google-...)

Anybody else got the auto-playing music? For a while couldn't figure out where it was coming from, then I saw the red sign for the new Priority Inbox and at first selected "No thanks" but that did nothing, and not until I accepted to turn it on did the music stop.

A bug? or some Google's programmer idea of being "helpful" or "funny"? I did not appreciate it.

What browser are you using?

Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 beta on Ubuntu Lucid

Yep I encountered it too (using Chrome on mac). Looks like it was a bug. Pretty funny though. There is probably some programmer getting seriously heckled right now in a late night hackathon over at Google. Wonder if they've broken out the drinks yet.

Had the same thing. Seems like enabling it in another browser will disable the ad, so you can go back using Chrome. Haven't tried disabling afterwards to see whether the ad comes back, though...

I seriously thought my account been hacked and someone's playing a practical joke on me...

There's a pinned answer over at their support forum, so it's not just you:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/label?lid=613f70...

Didn't they do something similar with the Pacman thing? Sounds like they don't have enough computers with working speakers...

Awesome. Now can we do it on a local MUA (Thunderbird, Mutt…), or on an MDA (procmail…)?

I like to own the computers that analyse my personal data. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648400

From the video, it looks like they have a Bayesian-style mail filter, but instead of applying it to find spam, they apply it to find important mail. This is not too hard to set up; the tricky bit they've automated is analyzing which emails are read and replied to, as opposed to just which ones are marked, so it's more automatic.

I use simple Outlook rules to automatically highlight emails from important people and friends...

However, this sounds like a "reverse bayesian spam filter" that instead of filtering out spam is filtering out "most important email" and learning over time ?

It shouldn't be too hard adjusting SpamBayes or similar filters to do this, should it ? Anyone know about any solution for Outlook ?

Sounds a lot like SaneBox, except with only one level of priority instead of a few graduated ones.

Hopefully this will be available for Google Apps hosted email.

It is already. Oddly enough it is already available on my Google Apps account but not yet on my standard Gmail account.

It says so in the announcement, so that's pretty likely.

"Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so."

Don't know how I missed that. Thanks.

Ooo, I've been looking forward to when I can use this for my personal account too. It takes some training but it's highly effective after a while.

I wonder how this feature will translate to in the Android Gmail client.

Looks like it is not yet available to "the rest of the world" - Asia :(

I wouldn't mind a similar system put in place for Google Reader next

This is pretty awesome, I just hope it plays nicely with OtherInbox.

Don't know if this is the best place to bring it up, but I don't think "bacn" is a good word for low-priority email. There are a lot of passionate email users who are even more passionate about bacon.

There could even be a backlash.

After four drafts of my response, I think it can be summed up in one sentence: Minus the paranoia, murder, and mayhem, Ted Kaczynski might have been on to something.

I just use http://www.unsubscribe.com and it fixes my junk mail and mailing list problem once and for all.

Um. I use sieve to classify mail and filter into different folders. Sieve is about ten years old.

If Google announced that they were supporting the managesieve protocol and/or allowing people to edit sieve filters for their account through a web interface, then I'd be impressed.

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