Dan Ariely Tries to Fix Email (2017)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Based on Dan's research we built a new gmail feature: high priority notifications. It only sends you a push notification for really important messages, cuts out over 90% of Gmail notifications for most users. https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-a...
Importance is defined by a model trained on reply rate and a few other engagement metrics.
Edit: High priority notifications is now available for both Android and iOS, contrary to what the link I included says
- Say you have a thread with 1 important+read email from weeks ago, and 1 unimportant+unread email received just now. There is a bug in Gmail conversation view in that it will neither appear in the "unread" section nor in the "important" section. The entire conversation is deemed important, so it's categorized into the "important" section rather than the "unread" section, but the conversation doesn't appear at the top of the section because the new email isn't important; the conversation date is grabbed from the earlier message, which is pushed way off the page since that message was from a long time ago. The end result is the user sees a baffling "Inbox (1)" without seeing any unread emails on the inbox page. Which is at least noticeable if you're the kind of person who regularly has "Inbox (1)", but if you're the kind who has "Inbox (5198)" then there's no way you're ever going to notice that email.
- Sometimes I deem an email important, but I don't want it cluttering up the Important section after I've handled it. But marking it as not-important would send the wrong feedback. I feel like this might not be an uncommon use case. Do you guys have any plans to address it?
- There's no way to keep an email marked as "spam" while still moving it out so as to save a copy. It will automatically get marked as "not spam". Could you guys please have a way to look into this?
- Related to spam but unrelated to importance: There is a bug where, if you have a filter to "never mark as spam", it will also apply the Inbox label. This breaks other filters that "archive" that same email.
- Unrelated to importance & spam, but in the new version of classic Gmail (I'm NOT referring to the new Gmail here) changing conversation view reloads all of Gmail. This wasn't the case before. Any chance they could fix this? It would be awesome if they could also provide a way to change email importance per-message rather than per-conversation.
- Also unrelated, but while I'm here: any chance you guys could add a "send-now" button for Undo Send? It makes life easier for the few occasions when you really want to send a response immediately rather than in 30 seconds.
Thank you!
1. Threads should be sorted by date of most recent email, regardless of importance. This sounds like a real bug and I'll dig into it.
2. Yes, great feedback. You could archive it, does that work?
3. What's the use case? Why do you want to keep spam? You could forward it to yourself and it should work (a bit hacky, i admit)
The last 3 are all not going to happen for a number of hard reasons, unfortunately.
1. Thanks! Let me know if you need additional info or can't repro, the last time this happened to me was a while ago (doesn't happen often since it requires subsequent emails to be far apart in time and categorized with different importance). EDIT: I just repro'd it again. The conversation ordering under the Important section is definitely based on the date of the last Important message rather than the date of the last message, so the conversation will fall out of the screen if the last important message in that conversation was a long time ago.
2. I use archiving for emails that I want records of, but that I don't want cluttering my inbox or appearing on my screen at all, unfortunately (like notifications about some activity on other sites). It's not the same thing as, say, a personal email or something from a mailing list that was unimportant but that should still get a little bit of eyeball time at some point.
3. There are a few use cases... sometimes I want to investigate why I got some spam after the 1-month period when it's deleted, meaning I want the message headers etc. to be there. Other times I want a filter that automatically keeps everything matching it because I might not be able to guarantee that I'll look into the spam folder every month, and I cannot risk losing some emails that way. (How do I respond when someone asks if I got their email and I don't have a copy to check?) I honestly think there's no compelling reason why whether or not an email is spam has to be tied to its lifetime.
For undoing, any chance you could address why "View Message" couldn't just send the email right then? It's impossible to undo afterward, so delaying after it's clicked seems entirely counterproductive, right?
Where would you put that button? right next to the Undo Send link? Where, in the rare panic to Undo Send... it might be hit accidentally?
"View Message" has already had this effect of preventing undoing, and it's been sitting next to "Undo" for the longest time. So yes, it could be there. Heck, View Message itself should probably just send the email immediately, since delaying after it's clicked is pointless. But in any case, I don't particularly care where the option is; I'm sure UI designers can come up with something. It could be in a drop-down somewhere or whatever and it would still be great.
Personally I have inbox zero via notmuch-emacs, and I use mails for nearly anything feeds included (RSS2Email) mails are automatically filtered on remote via IMAPFilter and I can refile locally if needed but I try to avoid doing so to have more "automatic" solution.
A proper taxonomy + a proper full-text and tag search are the solution, all messages locally under our control. Unfortunately for most there are ZERO modern MUA, only webmails are developed so most people are stuck with '90-era client and so leave their mailboxes in a messy state or leave their message on someone else server without any real personal backup.
I think this is wanted by many "big" that prefer proprietary platforms with various lock-in like webmails or even more "new things" with much more lock-in from Discourse to Slack, Disqus, Whatsapp etc. ALL of them are a limited proprietary solutions trying pushing people out of emails.
In my opinion, people should be more involved with the quoting of the previous message. Perhaps the customer could highlight the part of the previous message they want and have that become the quote. Or maybe a button when we write an email that will pull in the messages we're responding to as a quote.
Thunderbird supports that. Highlight the part of the original message that you want to become the quote, and hit 'Reply'.
Also, it will never be focused on your needs if it's free. Just pay the damn five bucks a month for fastmail or protonmail, etc. Or roll your own server. You'll get a nice clean interface and nobody shoving crap like AMP for email (aka embrace, extend, extinguish) down your throat. In my experience the spam filtering on fastmail has been just as good as gmail.
And notifications are the devil. Does anyone else get a little angry when they see ANY icon with some dumb pip with a 99+ next to it? Or any number? I'll check it when I'm good and ready. Maybe I should get a physical mailbox that starts screaming at me every time the mail comes too.
I have a telephone for notifications and they're activated by people calling me (or text/signal/whatsapp, but I can mute those as I desire). They know to do it if it's important. Anything else can be async. Life is frenetic enough.
I realize I may be a curmudgeon.
I’m glad I could help fix that for you!
Again... Google is already trying to do this for me. No, thank you - I can easily set up there rules for myself.
I hope I'm being too cynical and pragmatic.
Take a look at the comments in the thread about Huawei cheating on benchmarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931549. TL;DR: yes, they're doing it, yes everyone else is doing it too, has been doing it since forever, and it's not just phones, it's PC GPUs as well.
You're not being too cynical. The world is just fucked up.
Human beings love resources (money), power and control. Anything that gives them that can and will be exploited. Approach the world with that in mind and you can anticipate the vast majority of these issues. Game designers do this all the time without worrying about being "cynical".
But most people can't. Google isn't doing this for people like you, they are doing it for people like me that either don't know how to set it up or are happy for somebody else to take care of it for them.
And even for people like yourself that have the skills to set up these rules - why do you want to? Surely there are higher value projects for you to apply these skills.
I guess I wish the focus was on how email, as a basic underlying protocol, allows you to overlay whatever interface you want to match your productivity, and an example of how we can take advantage of this. Generally the UIs we use are designed by large companies to help themselves, only tangentially to help us...but if we stick to open and simple protocols, then we always have options available.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the relatively higher cost of paper office memos actually increased organizational efficiency by limiting junk and noise.
I spent some time at a sales position and working with email has always been hard
(Edit: it looks like you CAN turn it off in the settings.)
Here's some info on how it works if it helps address your concern: We've transformed the language generation problem into a labelling problem. From a systems point of view it's not any different from spam filtering, or tabbed inbox, and we use the exact same features. Smart Reply uses a whitelist of around 30k independently generated & sanitized phrases. You could think of each whitelist entry as a label. So when an email comes in on the delivery pipeline we just label things, like we've always done. We label (spam/not-spam) for spam filtering, we label (promo/social/update/forum) for tabbed inbox, and we label (Thanks!/Sounds good!/etc/etc) for smart reply.
Do you record what responses people choose? If so is that data used to personalize the responses or just stored in aggregate?
This was such a sneaky-good feature with Mailbox (before Dropbox shut it down) and solves a bulk of my priority / triage problems with email. I've surprisingly had a difficult time finding any other client that can do this.
...Though, knowing HN, I'm sure someone probably has one up their sleeve =)...
This allows me to have business actionables on top, then personal actionables, then unfiled bills, then new incoming messages.
I'm a huge fan of Mail.app, but my biggest frustration is that the colored flags don't carry to my iPhone (the latter of which only has one color flag in the Mail app.)
My other response is that I'm big on stack-ranking tasks / priorities, so your flow would be great for personal stuff, but not best for what I need for work.
You can also use 'super stars' to accomplish multiple priority states within starring.
Here's an example of a real power user: https://medium.com/@gregsramblings/how-i-tamed-gmail-at-work...