A new Gmail inbox
gmailblog.blogspot.com
gmailblog.blogspot.com
HN almost universally believes in execution over the idea, yet here we are trashing an idea before seeing the execution. It's great that Gmail is trying to innovate and improve the email experience. Maybe this feature won't work out but how about we try it out first?
I don't understand the negativity around change. If they never changed, people would complain that they are in a rut, that they don't innovate, etc.
To be clear, I would be fairly optimistic for the "new Inbox" if it weren't for the new GChat interface which worsened my user experience to add a feature, Google+ integration, I don't necessarily want.
Hotmail became Outlook.com a couple of months ago and it's quite nice actually :)
It says in the post that this feature can be turned off.
Google is at the forefront of machine learning. They have been doing it for a long time, and lately, they have taken it to a different level with new features rolled out across their various services.
For example, and you'd probably know, in Google Plus, now you can search pictures by the subject which can purely analyzes the data (without meta-data) and give you all the pictures of your cat.
I guess this new Inbox works in the same vein - I don't think it's just a big table of senders and their classifications - this seems to be more intelligent than that.
But it's okay to blindly criticize Google - in fact, it happens automatically if you are using a Macbook Air.
The already existing feature is more intelligent than "a big table of senders". For example, some of the emails I receive from Amazon are sent directly to me as notifications and some are filtered away into Promotions to be viewed on my schedule. It is smart enough to know that I don't want my day interrupted by Amazon's next sale but do want to see my order confirmations from Amazon as soon as they are received.
I am not criticizing Google, I am just noting that this is not a new feature but a Gmail labs experiment graduating into the main Gmail feature set with a fresh new coat of UI polish.
I would rather they just left it in labs.
Nowadays the corporations make all the choices for you. They know what's good for you, better than you do. Maybe.
I guess I like viewing messages in the context of a conversation, but not composing them that way. I just wish that I had the option of composing things separately.
C'est la vie.
Additionally, with this interface, it could be more integrated with hangouts and cross google's services (maybe easier send email pop up on andriod tablets?).
The "pop out" choice is a poor one since it turns Compose into 3 operations: Press compose, press the pop-out button, press maximize on the new window.
(as for the chat box, I use Minimalist, and my Gmail UI is trimmed of anything extraneous).
the problem with google launch for that feature is that they DID NOT give the choice.
So, people that is not slow and know how to use tabs effectively, got their writing space crippled. and it became a pain to actually see the email i wanted under the in-page-popup composer. because you know, some people have 10inch screens.
at least now they made it available to go back to the old format. ...that will give me a few more months to look to a gmail alternative.
The interesting truth is that Zenter was the first. I know because they demoed it to me in 2007 shortly before Google acquired them.
Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
As several people have pointed out there's actually a keyboard shortcut that does what I want ("d") I didn't know about, so now I'm at least slightly less grumpy about it.
Now if only there was a shortcut for 'reply/forward in new tab' or I could change the default size for cmd+r reply in new window or gmail remembered the dimensions I last resized the new window to.
(function showMenuInterval() {
Array.prototype.forEach.apply(document.querySelectorAll('[aria-label="Insert more menu"]'), [function(menu) { menu.style.display='none'; }]);
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setTimeout(showMenuInterval, 50);
}());I'm guessing it's optimized for non-power users, but it should at least be customizable, or better yet learn which icons are most used and bring them to the main toolbar.
I don't think they would ever create anything without a decent reasoning behind it. May not be your reasoning, but there is one.
So how about making the window sizeable, and remember the user's preference? And maybe when it's over a certain size the formatting bar gets permanent screen space.
As you might have guessed, I hate the new compose...
It's an unadulterated Gmail 1.0 html-only UI. Very 2004.
Personally, if I try to use it for more than 30 seconds I want to die. But YMMV.
Its more like idea * execution, where the range for each input (and the output, consequently) is [0,1].
Might not be quite so linear though.
To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a force of "6 Newtons", even though the two are related by F = m * a. Similarly here, dragonwriter is defining "quality = idea * execution", so there's no reason to expect that the numerical value of this notion of quality should be directly comparable to the numerical value of either of its components. (Comparing the value of "quality" defined this way to the value of "idea" would require assuming some specific value for "execution" for the comparison to be sensible. If you just compare the numbers directly, you're assuming perfect 1.0 execution, which probably isn't what you intended.)
Generally, yes, or at least "not better and usually worse."
But I said "more like idea * execution" -- compared to min(idea, execution) -- and the "more like" is important. Its not a strict mathematical relationship, and sometimes an imperfect implementation of an imperfect concept will end up better than either the implementation or the concept because it will be equivalent to a better implementation of a better concept by accident. But that's kind of exceptional case.
Nor do I agree that execution trumps ideas. Both are necessary and insufficient for success, but execution is far easier to commoditize. Those who can't judge good ideas from bad attribute everything to execution, of course. Those who can see the failure of the cult of execution all around. Even Google is abandoning 'see what sticks' in favor of Apple's ideas-directed approach.
What I see growing on HN "these days" is the notion that comments must be either positive or negative, and that they shouldn't be negative. I prefer comments, however imperfect, which strive for the truth.
>"Both [Execution and Ideas] are necessary and insufficient for success..."
How is it anti-useful? In which way does it hinder anything useful?
>2. while it may be useful for some, it is another clear step toward throwing in the towel on e-mail as a platform for serious discourse.
It is not. It is a buttonbar for selecting pre-categorized mails. It does nothing against email itself and doesn't change its usefuleness for discussions at all.
I'd love to hear you expand on this, because for me it seems like the exact opposite. By taking extraneous and superficial emails out of the main view, doesn't this make e-mail better suited for serious discourse?
Then there's automatic signature hiding, hiding of addressees, lack of support for constant-width typography, integration of bullshit from Plus (like insisting on autocompleting names from Plus rather than what's been previously sent and received), many facets of the new "compose experience", etc.
Google have made it clear they intend to be the McDonalds of software. Too bad... I used to be such a fan. But since they make ad-supported software, the McDonalds equilibrium was bound to obtain eventually.
I'm just going to stick with dear old yahoo mail and leave it at that. Its might be old, even stagnant, but it is simple, clear, functional and causes me zero grief. As it has done for 15 odd years.
People can say what they want to say, at least within HN guidelines. It's not like these are YouTube comments. And I'm not sure about the almost universal belief in execution over idea either, or at least I'm happy to be one of your counterexamples. Can't both be important?
Finally, it's not like Google's proposal is equivalent to some kid's after-school project. Context matters, and in the latter case it would be quite unfair to trash it. If anything, people know that parts of Google read HN and hope somehow that their voices get heard.
1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all. You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created.
2) When you turn it on, it disables Gmail's multiple inbox. Multiple inbox is the only thing saving my email from being a complete and utter disaster right now.
3) Judging by how they are forcing the new compose on everyone it is reasonable to expect that they will force us to use this as well. (The new compose screws up at least two workflows for me, btw. For example, sending a form email to several people is now a pain because I have to manually click "edit subject" to remove the "Fwd:"). If they force this on me, it will completely destroy my ability to use gmail. If they want me to leave gmail for good, that would be the way to guarantee it.
What a mess.
Now they've implemented their own version of tabs.
Just support native browser controls, please. People understand them. They're simple. They work. The more stuff they add, the heavier Gmail becomes... and the more of a pain it is to load in multiple real tabs.
By this logic, the old one is at least as fascist. Additionally, while you might not like the new style, "real" feature was removed, but the ability to write multiple emails at once, or write one while one is open, were added.
Edit: I just tried to old one to see it again. It is rather bulky. It needed a UI update of some kind at least. (which may have been accomplished not semi-popped out, i guess)
"If it's not broken, don't fix it"
I've learned from past email programs that's a recipe for disaster. Turn those two off and I'd gladly use keyboard shortcuts.
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
And that's just off the top of my head...
Sure you can. Just drag an email between them. It gives you the option to permanently move emails from that sender to a specific tab. Presumably, it also adapts to your selections, much like their priority and spam filters.
Considering Google has already allowed users to choose from 5 different Inbox styles for years now, I don't really think your conclusion is logical.
Labels and filters solve several Gmail problems but demand too much footwork on my part. I found that my Gmail experience got better when I adopted this credo about two weeks ago:
Thou shalt have but one Gmail label, and that label's name shalt be "Needs Reply".
Either it can wait, and be there when I specifically look (search) for it, or it needs a reply. I need to know which emails need replies, and I generally need to label them manually.
Labels beyond this I view as a distraction. I used to label everything, now I label nothing. The fewer you can use the better, I think.
And yet I still want a label or two for all the semi-solicited mail I get. Things that I do not need in my inbox, but ought to be there for my idle perusement: Banana Republic sales, MyHabit "deals", Newegg dailies, Kindle book of the day deals, and so on.
And then there are things like Facebook updates. Nice to know, but I'll get to them eventually anyway the next time I open up Facebook, which I look at about as much as my grandmother checks the weather (read: Every hour, and for no reason).
If this wants to distill my system for me then I'm ready with open arms. Bigger tabs at the top are way better than a hard-to-parse list on the side. Can't they turn it off for a complainer and roll it out to me?
I'm glad this works for you, but keeping track of and searching through years of emails -- and chats -- with dozens of disparate people and clients makes labels, or something similar, indispensable to me.
Going overboard and having a label for everything under the sun would, for most of us, decrease their utility. But in at least some use cases, having many labels definitely is not in and of itself a bad thing.
In terms of labeling emails that need replies for me if it's still in the inbox if it needs a reply / action. If I'm done with an email I archive it.
Every time I read comments on HN about how people have these "amazing" systems of filtering and labeling in gmail I always wonder if there's anyone else who uses gmail like I use it.... turns out there is and they've doubled my high score.
In other words, to be the most useful, a label needs to have as few uses as possible, or else become a separate folder for perusing. And if a label looks just like a search, skip the clutter and just do the search. If its a bin for perusing, well, good on this new feature.
I can't imagine when I'd want to view all emails labeled "Invoice", for instance. If I know I'm looking for a software key, then doing a search will be much faster than clicking on the label and eyeballing it for the right one.
In your example that's also something you have to label manually. If you forget one and then look through the "Invoice" label folder and don't find it, you have to go do a search anyway. As much as possible I want to reduce the number of things that could be screwed up by mere forgetfulness. So by not using labels there is no chance of screwing it up, and there's less work to do to boot.
So I'd rather not concern myself with taking the time to organize my to-be-archived emails into labels unless it represents a non-trivial gain, and I don't think the gains are very large in nearly every practical case. "Needs-reply" is the only one, since it represents a separate queue of to-do emails.
I think your logic is seriously flawed, but as long as it's your email and not mine, so be it!
Labelling is a way of demonstrating intent, though. I want to see tax-related invoices for the organisation I'm helping out with; not everything actually has the words "invoice" in it, or mention the organisation.
Either you need to introduce AI for me to teach, or let me impose search information on the email itself. Tagging is just a way of doing the latter.
If an email needs a reply, I hit reply and save it as a draft.
My drafts is now my one and only email to-do list.
I draw a distinct line between my work e-mail and my personal e-mail. In my work e-mail I have a lot of rules, filters, automatic labels, and use multiple inboxes. I also need to read and deal with most every e-mail I receive. In this inbox I don't (and frankly wouldn't want to) use the new Gmail inbox. Based on many of the threads here on HN, this is the perspective many have in mind.
However, for my personal inbox it's been a godsend. The automatic labeling is highly accurate, and where it's not you can correct it and it learns/adapts. I can live in my "primary" inbox and only venture into the other tabs (social, updates, promotions, forums) only when I want to. I used priority inbox, and this is an improvement on that, in my opinion.
So while I have a bias here, I've really, really enjoyed having this for at least one of my inboxes. :)
My system is simple: do not sign-up for newsletter or notifications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc.) you won't read, unsubscribe anytime you realize you don't read the ones you receive, delete emails you won't ever need again, archive the ones that are nice to keep around but won't require anything from you anytime soon, and use filters whenever possible.
So in the end, I don't receive that many emails per day. I certainly don't receive any promotions in the mail… that's just asking for trouble.
Right now I have 25 threads in my inbox and the vast majority of them I keep around because they have pictures I want to save in iPhoto but haven't had time to. (I need to find a system for that actually)
I don't feel bad about clicking it because I trust Gmail as a whole to be smart enough not to penalize an account globally if I'm the only one reporting it. Plus, when I do it, it's because it's actually spam.
Over time, it really works.
Spam is not just about scams, malware, and crime. It is about the annoying deluge, the fact that I have to open a browser and enable Javascript from 20 different sources when I unsubscribe, and generally about unsolicited, unwanted email trying to get me to do things I am not going to do. Filters, including a spam filter, are what keep my inbox under control.
I've got into the habit of marking all email with "unsubscribe" in it as read by default. I'll still see it when I open up my inbox, but it avoids me ever seeing a notification for something useless.
* Put all newsletters in a tab so I don't see them * Delete all but the latest five unread of any particular subscription * Delete anything older than 180 days -- even if I've read it, unless I've 'starred' it.
Can it do that? Coz that would absolutely kill for subscriptions. iTunes does that sort of thing for podcasts. How can newsletters be harder?
But if your filter archives, labels and marks as read the emails, you're fine because your inbox is cleared of them but you still have the ability to check the activity.
One massively helpful resource for this is gmane. You sign up for the mailing list and disable the delivery of mail (usually you must be subscribed to the list to post a message), then use gmane to read messages (hopefully using your favorite NNTP client instead of the gmane website).
> My system is simple: do not sign-up for newsletter
> or notifications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, GitHub,
> etc.) you won't read, unsubscribe anytime you realize
> you don't read the ones you receive, delete emails
> you won't ever need again, archive the ones that are
> nice to keep around but won't require anything from
> you anytime soon, and use filters whenever possible.
I've been managing my email fairly well with various hand-rolled filters (which are a pain to update) since the 1990s and I have to say: I still think there's a lot of potential value in what Google is rolling out here.
> unsubscribe anytime you realize
> you don't read the ones you receive,
This doesn't work for me.
The reason why is because there are whole classes of emails (notifications, etc) that I do want to read... but only occasionally, and I don't want those classes of emails clogging up my inbox.
Obviously, I can and do manage this myself today with filters/rules/labels/etc. It is totally possible. It is also a pain in the butt sometimes. So I'm eager to see what Google can do here.
I totally understand that it's a problem for many people. (you should see my wife's inbox… I try to intervene now and then but it's a lost cause)
I almost wish I had an inbox problem so that I could try Mailbox, Sparrow, or whatever to finally have a solution to my problem. :)
I don't know what to do anymore. I'm expecting a lot from this new gmail UI
For quite some time, I've been happy with GMail because I set up a system through which each email is ultimately stored in one of my predefined labels. I wrote an article about it [1]. It's both simple to setup and easy to use. And although I don't receive that many emails, I believe it can scale quite easily.
That said, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. If the automatic filtering is done well, it will be a killer feature for normal users.
From glancing over her shoulder, I know my girlfriend has hundreds, if not thousands of unread mails, most of which would probably end up in the promotions tab.
I'm positive this change will make it much easier for her to check her email at a glance.
Some recent startups have tried to solve this problem, i.e. my friends at Lightermail: http://www.lightermail.com
What Gmail is really doing is adding more layers of complexity. Now they have hard wired folders (inbox, sent, etc), labels (aka custom folders), tabs in the inbox, and importance markers (starred / not).
They're making the same mistake that consumed many of Microsoft's email efforts: adding complexity thinking that's how you add 'power controls' and make it easier to sort mail.
They can make it possible for me to easily search a trillion pages online from one input box, with a great hit ratio for what I'm actually looking for. But they need to add comical layers of complexity - none of which is new or unique - just to sort my email? It's depressing if that's the best their Gmail team can do.
These 'features' have been done before by other companies and other services, and they didn't solve the sorting problem of email. They're just repeating mistakes other companies made many years ago. There's nothing special about sub folders for an inbox folder, even if you call it a tab.
I would argue that Google needs to think originally again about email, as they did when they first came up with Gmail, and not repeat the poor product choices made by other email products and services.
You say this has been done before, what hasn't. You should live with the features for a while before jumping to immediately trashing them without even having used them.
Nothing is "new or unique" - and nobody wants that either. They want steady improvements without losing familiarity.
If he actually read it, no reason to complain because you can turn it off.
I think the fear is that eventually they won't let you turn it off. Google has a habit of doing this type of thing with Gmail (eg the new UI, and the new compose)
Currently, you can't direct searches within nested folders. You either search all messages, or search within one folder/label. So for example, I have e-mails grouped by project, and within big projects there are sub-labels:
project1/testing
project1/doc
project1/proposals
...
project2/testing
...
Search also could use a grep-like capability. The "advanced search" options are a bit of a joke, especially coming from a company that cut its teeth on search.
For example I have a nested label "Invites" in the label "Calendar" (Calendar/Invites). Searching "label:calendar-invites blah" searches for "blah" inside the nested label.
However, to perform a successful search with specific constraints, you must either:
1) Remember a keyword
2) Have a label for the particular constraint you want to use
Our little startup, SolNovus (http://solnovus.com), has been investigating how to make a couple power-user functions like this more accessible. Our priorities are:
1) Fuzzy topic search: make keywords more forgiving
2) Analysis and visualization of email graph: sift through related threads and see the impact of search constraints, represent scale and organization with more than an inbox counter
The issue arises if you know the message you want is somewhere under Calendar, but you're not sure whether it's in Calendar/Invites or Calendar/Rejected or Calendar/DateNotSetYet. As far as I know, it's not possible to search them all at once, just by searching under the tag Calendar.
Sieve support. Why do I need to log into their website (i.e. why do I need to log in a second time, when I already logged in via my mail client) just to set up a server-side filter?
Does it work that well for you? How much email do you get on a daily basis?
(I work at a small software startup, SolNovus, that has been exploring this for a while, and for us, it doesn't seem to work that well in practice. Users can't always remember keywords for long-archived messages and have to resort to scanning pages of emails, even when tagged.)
Really, I think the ticket to having an inbox you don't have to organize is not to hide everything beneath the search box, however smart it may be. At some level, you need to incrementally generate queries, because the search will be imperfect. Things like search visualization methods that help incrementally refine queries, tied to more flexible and configurable machine learning, look promising.
And this is why /r/technology is going downhill.
OH, wait a minute! Never mind..
As a result, any changes are inevitably going to break our workflow. Even changes that are better for the common man cannot be better than our customized system.
For example, now it filters social email into the same folder: great, I can ignore it while I'm at work. Except my twitter alerts from my company account. So it breaks.
As another example, you apparently can't customize the tabs, and it disables multiple inbox. I spent a few years coming up with the optimum GTD steup for myself in gmail, and it's broken now.
I think the solution here is really for people like me to use a different email client. Gmail has become the defacto winner, but there's probably a market in making a different client for tech-savvy, very heavy users, with customizable interactions.
In contrast to the "new" compose box which will eventually be forced onto everyone.
I just wish the compose box was freely movable. On a very large screen it is indeed awkward to type in the bottom right corner only.
(1) I could write several messages at once. Useful if you want to look things up, and keep multi-tasking.
(2) I can refer to other messages while writing one.
Seconded. It's actually very painful to write on the bottom right corner; also at times pasting large amount of text in to the box screws its interface. When you've some formatting on the text pasted there, something goes crazy.
I recently quit accessing my primary Gmail account and this is one of the main reasons for it.
Other being the amount of spam that started coming in, in the name of notifications, deals and whatever "my friend has unlocked...".
I also found Gmail forcing a lot of G+ around the header of my inbox, and tonnes of services that I have never opened or would not be interested in. Unable to switch those off.
That said, I do find this label-tab option interesting. Will definitely give it a go.
[Edits] Added thoughts.
The new compose window makes me want to switch away from Gmail. It should be purely optional.
I can see how it is a personal preference issue but it does server a useful purpose as far as I can tell.
I dunno. Automatically identifying "Promotions" and sending them off to their own tab seems to be good for helping me avoid dealing with things trying to get me to spend money when I don't want to, just the same as doing the same thing for "Spam" does.
> It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.
Seems to me to be exactly the opposite: having a "Promotions" tab separate from the "Primary" inbox, and especially automatically routing promotional material to that "Promotions" tabl seems to draw the line between the normal content of my inbox and marketing/advertising material more clearly than it is without that feature.
(Which, if you think about it, makes sense from a purely self-interested point of view for Google-as-ad-seller; the easier it is for you to isolate and ignore email-based advertising, the more valuable the web-based advertising that Google sells is.)
Whichever tabs you choose to have (and if you use the layout, you choose which of the tabs are active) are available as views into your email. This both makes them out-of-the-way when their subject isn't what you want to view, and available when it is.
> The point of filtering out spam (given the more pleasant name "Promotions" now)
Not the same thing: spam (unsolicited commercial email) is still spam. Promotions are for promotions that aren't spam. The reasons why you might not want them in your normal email box are similar, but the probability that you will at some time want to review promotions for more than "did something get here by accident".
Yeah. They used to automatically file non-spam promotional emails into a separate folder where you could safely ignore them, but now they just go into your regular inbox! Money-grabbing so and so's.
(...is what you'd be saying if this feature were being eliminated rather than introduced...)
No. It files all your emails that it classifies as promotional but non-spam. That won't include Google Offers and Zagat if you're not subscribed to Google Offers or Zagat (for me, it's mostly events & careers newsletters). It's just an auto-categoriser (a new UI for smart labels), it doesn't invent new emails that weren't there before.
Several people in this thread have already explained this. If you don't believe us, go to gmail and switch to the new view - there doesn't seem much point in doing competing close-readings of a short blog post when you can see how it works first hand...
That doesn't remotely begin to describe my inbox, but then again I haven't been in high school for a long time now. Where is the tab for "bills"?
It's a label you create with a filter that has all the email addresses of your providers, so everything skips your Inbox and gets sorted automatically.
Who said GMail has to be designed for engineers? The majority of people have no idea what a filter is and wouldn't be able to figure one out even if you told them where to find it.
As long as the features that I need are there, I don't care what fluff they add on top, so long as I can turn it off. And I can turn this off.
These all seem like things people have in their email regardless of age. Your point seems pretty flimsy.
Maybe this means opportunities will arise for a newer cooler mail service.
One more reason to remove the google flow from your critical path. We always knew there was going to be a time that they needed to please shareholders over users, and that time has come.
This is the monetization of gmail. Eyeballs directed towards actual paying or ad-supported services, which is a huge advantage.
This started over a year ago, and has gotten even worse.
http://threehuskies.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/why-is-there-a-...
If this new Gmail feature doesn't suit you, you can TURN IT OFF.
New feature announced --> Deployed to @gmail users -- Deployed to Apps users --> Old feature deprecated --> old feature removed
Google has a feature of eventually forcing people onto bad UI layouts.. for example Youtube.
For two, I struggle to think of a UI cockup of an email app on the level required to drive people to switch ecosystems.
Data? Projecting much, aren't you? My anecdotal evidence contradicts yours.
As an entrepreneur, this seems phenomenally relevant, given the relative penetration of GMail among early adopters. The choices that GMail makes can, within limits of what users will tolerate, create new behaviors for its users and eliminate old ones. This can create landgrab opportunities for startups capable of harnessing the new forms of attention and be destructive for startups addicted to the old forms.
So, girls are all about knitting, dates, having their nails painted and buying shoes? I know they just took some trends (knitting and lindy hop), but I found the ad awkwardly worded.
Maybe it's just referring to personal inboxes, or someone that does not know how to keep the inbox clean, or how gmail is supposed to make your day easier, I don't know.
Here's my first impressions:
1. [Primary] tab was very accurate, right off the bat. It detected all personal and important emails properly. And all social updates went to, well, [Social].
2. [Promotions/Updates]: these two are a bit all over the place. Honestly I don't even understand exactly what they meant by "Promotions", but seems it's "anything that is long, but not personal, and certainly not a simple automatic trigger/trigger". All mixed up. Promos went to Updates, and vice-versa.
3. It also failed to detect several emails from discussion lists and blog posts, that went incorrectly to [Promotions] or [Updates], when it should have gone to [Forums]
4. For now there's no ability to customize the tabs. At all. WYSIWYG. Not even the label. The "+" is just a shortcut to enable/disable one of the 4 additional tabs (besides Primary, that is always visible).
Overall, this is clearly a beta version, so it'll be interesting to see how they improve the functionality over the next releases. I'm sure it'll be a nice addition to most types of users (particularly those that have thousands of emails archived - which is not my case).
I just wished I could customize the labels right away; it's something so small and ridiculously simple to implement, yet it would allow users to make it personally relevant to them. But considering the OP, this should be coming soon.
ps: I can't understand why so many negative comments about an optional feature. At least for now - and likely the next 6-12 months - you'll have the option to simply not use it. And if (when?) they force it down your throat, well, just vote with your money... Oh, wait. Did I just say money?
My main complaint is that it adds yet another set of controls on a cluttered and unintuitive interface that has already been changing recently. The tabs go away when you're looking at an individual email, so you can't go straight from a message in one folder to another category. As far as I can tell, when looking at a message and a new one comes in, you can't tell which category it is in. You only see that is there via an "Inbox (1)" in the sidebar.
All in all, I think this is useful, but the overall Gmail UI is still disappointing, and getting busier and less intuitive instead of more helpful.
A combination of tabbed, filtered content and "unread first" would be a sweet spot as I'd quite fancy being able to prioritise unread email by subject matter without being inundated with those promo emails I'm not quite motivated to set "mark as read" or "junk" filters for.
And if you don't have Android 4.0+, if you enable this feature you won't be able to see half of your emails - because apparently updating apps for older versions of Android is really hard, despite literally everyone except the people that made Android having no problem doing it whatsoever.
(note to those not on Android: some of Google's own apps only update in lock step with the Android version, so you can only upgrade your Google Talk app by upgrading your whole O/S - which in practice often means buying a new phone)
On the flip side, if you see this behavior, you can log in, search for [in:inbox .ics], select all the results, and choose "archive". Neat bug.
I use Gmail and Outlook to manage different email accounts. The Outlook.com inbox has smart categories which are similar to these new Gmail categories/tabs. Instead of tabs across the top like Gmail, Outlook.com has Quick Views on the left hand side which activate the category filter.
Hopefully Gmail will allow you to customize what is filtered by their smart categories like Outlook.com does today.
I have a feeling this new Inbox is going to be another iteration of fail.
On the one hand I see this as the Office-ification of gmail, the accumulation of useless features that add bulk and complexity but not utility. On the other, this is Google's reaction to the phenomenon of people signing up for multiple things from their email account and getting cluttered as a consequence. Not for me but probably of great use to people with lots of social- and shopping- traffic.
there are really bent on shooving G+ down ppl's throats.
Now I'm considering whether or not to actually publish the version of the game with achievements/high-scores...
Doesn't seem right for me, but I guess I can see the draw for folks who don't want to deal with setting this stuff up themselves. (Which is probably most folks.)
We are working in user-defined contexts from day one (not all users fit into the 5-context model), but I think incorrect classification is the most important issue to address to minimize user frustration. We are approaching it by treating topic and context membership fuzzily and using graph visualization to aid in traversal of inexact queries.
I couldn't agree with you more: there are serious problems with binary membership and "automatic" filtering.
But I have to say, reading this on mobile (Chrome for iOS) is next to impossible. The scrolling is all over the place. Thankfully ihackernews has a "view text" mode that makes this more sane.
But, that's why they allow an option to disable it :-)
It's more customizable, has been learning categorizations for various sender addresses for years, and works with Gmail labeling.
And then today this thing comes up. I'm happy, today is a good day. Unicorns and puppies everywhere!
Creating and managing more and more filters for every single new sender of email gets to be a pain. Every time a new one comes in, you have to go through multiple steps to create one, and then if you unsubscribe, you have to remember to remove the filter, if you don't want your filter list to just get unmanageable.
I find the smart labels do a pretty good job of capturing the main categories I want filtered into particular labels and hidden from my main inbox -- without any extra effort on my part. In my mind, anything that works well and saves me from tedious work is well worth it.
Wonder how this scheme will work with that?
Also how will this work with something like Mailbox app for iphone?
If that's not relevant to the HN community I'm not sure what is.