To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.
You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox.
The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he should read the 1 billion pages himself to determine which is most important to his search query.
There are not 1 billion emails in an inbox but any number of messages greater than a few hundred is the equivalent in information unmanageability.
It's an inescapable math problem. If you only have ~16 waking hours a day, you may only be able to realistically dedicate ~4 hours to reading and responding to emails. Your allocation of that finite time is a zero-sum game. The math problem: the outside world can stuff more unimportant emails in your inbox than you have the human capability to read and curate. Therefore you must have a robot "reader" assist you.
The original programmer for Gmail back in 2001 was Paul Buchheit. The busy people (like his boss Larry Page) with overflowing email inboxes were the first users giving him feedback on how to make it work better for their productivity.
Auto filtering and smart threading are examples of "artificial intelligence" (so to speak) applied to email. Those features came from internally dogfooding Gmail before public release April 1 2004. Later, they added a feature called "Priority inbox" based on machine learning.[1]
What makes you believe Gmail isn't meant to help filter overflowing emails on behalf of the user?
[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
excerpt: "Many Gmail users receive tens or hundreds of mails per day. The Priority Inbox attempts to alleviate such information overload by learning a per-user statistical model of importance, and ranking mail by how likely the user is to act on that mail."
In Gmail you can (un)label email as being important, which will then train an algorithm just like a spam filter. Besides that, it will learn to recognise email you reply to often as being important.
I very much like this feature; I set up the Gmail app on iOS to only send me push notifications for important mail. For me that strikes a good balance between no distractions and not missing out on important email.
This is not that: it's you, giving a giant personal information sponge, a bigger tap.
This features makes the experience better for users without having to give any additional information.
Yes, you can (supposedly) train the "importance" filter, but how many people will do that?
Those "objective filters" prevent me from sending email from home (I have to relay through a non-residential IP).
I receive about a dozen spam email per day (with occasional surges and lapses). My server accepts everything, and a simple local filter from my mail user agent (Evolution or Thunderbird, mainly) let few through, and false positives are very rare.
I'm not sure why the giant providers need to work any differently.
- 57 rejected messages designated as spam by SpamAssassin
- 137 greylisted messages, most of which will end up being spam as those addresses which I communicate with regularly will be in the whitelist.
- 181 connection attempts blocked at the gate due to protocol violations (most of them due to fake HELO, usually trying to connect using my own server's FQDN)
- 144 delivery attempts blocked at RCPT due to the use of blacklisted recipient addresses. This is why using recipient-specific sender addresses makes sense when communicating with commercial, organisational or governmental institutions: it makes it possible both to track down who leaked or sold addresses to spammers as well as to block those addresses entirely.
This domain has been handling mail for close to 23 years now, the server is used daily by about 8 people, it also forwards mail for a few others.
I generally don't see more than one or two spam messages per week in my actual INBOX.
I also get no more than 1-2 spam message per week in my inbox.
http://onoffswitch.net/fogbugz-priority-prediction-naive-bay...
Filtering into "email that I want a push notification for" versus "email that I'll read in a few hours when I check" makes sense. What I don't get is people who are using this as a way to divide into emails they'll read and emails they won't read. Given that genuine spam is so rare these days, any email that gets as far as you gmail "unimportant" inbox is an email that you in some sense requested; if your inbox is full of mailing lists and newsletters that you don't read, wouldn't unsubscribing be a better route than filtering them out?
So yeah, hand holding is good, because to be honest, I don't get up on a Saturday morning and say "oh boy I can't wait to setup my email filters, right after I tweak my Arch Linux install and add a few more lines to my .vimrc!"
This sense of being looked down upon for relinquishing control over things that to be honest, I don't care that much about is just annoying after a time.
I see it as "can someone tie my shoelaces for me please?" level of non-responsibility. And it scares me.
I loved driving stick shift, but I’m not sorry to see it go either.
It allows me to have notifications only for stuff I probably care about. It helps cut down on the crap. At the same time, no e-mail is urgent. If things were urgent, contact me some other way. I check my non-important email roughly daily but no guarantees.
My point being that important e-mail doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be close enough that I probably care about the notifications, and don't miss too many notifications.
It's a matter of degree of course, but scary seems too strong a word.
How can that same technique not be used for marking important emails?
Conversely, if someone I've never exchanged emails with before, but who got my details through a third party wants to discuss a business opportunity, is that spam?
If you define spam narrowly as "unsolicited", then sure, it's somewhat objective (although even then, you have to work what was solicited in ways other than an initial email). But there's quite a bit of subjectivity involved in the more useful and generally accepted definition.
"Objective filters" (by which I assume you mean "rule based") can easily be worked around by the people trying to get through the filter. All you gotta do is figure out the rule and bam, you are back in again.
Sure it might work for your tiny little family domain name with your tiny 10 mailbox email server. No spammer gives a crap about you. But when you are on the scale of gmail, you will have a lot of people whose entire purpose in life is getting through your spam filters. "Objective filters" turn into a continual game of whack-a-mole. Put in a rule, wait half a day until somebody works around that rule, put in another rule.... repeat ad nauseam.
"Objective Filters" don't scale at all. They might filter out the riff-raff script kiddies but anybody whose livelihood is based on getting past your "objective filters" will easily overcome them.
Also, the wording was "... and what can wait for later", which doesn't sound like spam was meant - I don't think people keep their spam messages and read through them later, e.g. over the weekend. :)
I agree that spam detection is not an exact science, and that it is in fact quite subjective. It's also quite valuable!
It's not. This is how and why people keep missing actually important email, because friend X changed their email address for reasons, but they are not in the contact list, so it must be spam/phishing.
We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.
We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.
Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.