Google Inbox
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
Side question: am I the only person fully satisfied by my email workflow? I practice inbox 0- if an email is in my inbox, it means something needs to be done about it (whether it's replying, filing a bug report, writing a patch, etc). Once it's done, it gets archived. I star the stuff that I'll need to refer to later, like tickets for a flight or concert. I then have a few server side rules to do things like mark certain classes of emails as read (eg build logs, mailing lists), so as to not flood my phone with notifications. And... that's it.
(edit: oh and yes, I am also very diligent about unsubscribing from the stuff I know will never be relevant, rather than just archiving it and forgetting about it until another email from the same source comes up a week later. After a few weeks of consistently practicing this, your inbox gets much better)
I get probably a few hundred emails a day at most (work+personal), and this system works great for me. I know people like Paul Graham think email is utterly broken, but when you're at their level I'm not sure ~any~ tool will be satisfying - they're absolutely outliers.
So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?
I'm also on the lighter side of email load/work, but I don't see how a simple/efficient/clean workflow like this could be improved.
Yeah. And with a few (well, 119) filters, it's actually pretty rare that an e-mail hits my inbox. Rare enough to have notifications on my phone enabled.
Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's just being used by people in a way it wasn't meant to be. I bet a lot of people's email 'conversations' would work better in a chat app (i.e. they don't need an easily searchable record and they aren't typing long messages).
119 is completely sane.
I did :) I found my personal email a mess. I have a lot of mailing lists i need to "semi" pay attention to, and get about 1000+ emails a day all told.
This was pretty messy to manage, even with foldering/labeling/etc and such.
Inbox is pretty nice for my workflow (i'm sure there are some it is good for, and some it is bad for). I have it figure out the importance of various mailing list messages, and then show them to me once a day per mailing list. I mark the ones i care about with pins or reminders, and it takes care of reminding me.
On the work side, i get even more email, and i don't have a great workflow there. But i'm completely an outlier. I essentially have two distinct jobs I do for the company.
Practicing inbox zero in either case is unlikely to work for various reasons (among other things, most of my job is not predicated on making quick decisions but on thoughtful ones I could just move everything to task lists, but it would just create another place with the same info and often a worse interface)
Similarly, I've never seen the advantage of leaving old emails in my inbox rather than just archiving everything without labeling it.
For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.
The advantage I find to archiving messages is just a slight psychological boost. When the inbox is empty, I know I have nothing to do. If I have <20 emails (I always try to keep these inboxes under 20), I can see everything I have to do. As I work my way through the list, it's obvious visual feedback that I'm making progress. Just little things that I feel slightly improve my experience.
Although this only works because I have my other massive "online" inbox :D
Some of these threads (for me) are good explanations/resources about a particular problem, but which I can't act on yet as $OtherTask is higher priority. I have Jira tickets for most of these, but even so the inbox helps remind me (roughly monthly) that things are still Not Fixed, whereas a TODO label would end up being unread.
Maybe it's just that I've been depending on that and have NOT been using a TODO or similar label for things, and thus am not in the habit of checking for New Things in my filtered labels. I'll have to think about this more. Thanks in advance for your insight. :)
- If it requires a task and I can do it within 2 minutes, then I just do it. - If it requires a task that'll take more than 2 minutes, I schedule the task on my calendar and archive the email. - If it's just for future reference (eg, flight confirmation), I add an appropriate label ("Travel") and archive it. - If it's none of the above, then it either gets archived or just deleted.
So I don't have the problem that Inbox is trying to solve. What I'm wondering is will this eventually be forced onto all users, whether we need it or not?
In most cases, I know what I want, and I am OK with opening the app that can do the job for me. However, I want that app work properly and always. That's why I don't find Google Now too appealing: I don't want a personal assistant who tries to figure out what I want. I want a personal assistant that can do what I want when I ask for it. I don't need an app that scrapes my email for airline tickets -- I need an app that makes me easy to look up delays and departure times. I don't want an app that sets an alarm clock automatically when I have a meeting because there are two cases: 1) I need an alarm, but then I need to be 100% sure that it's set (and I don't want to double check whether magical AI figured it out properly) 2) I don't need an alarm (so I don't want my personal assistant to set up one). I cannot risk missing somethink: if it's not important, I'll try to unsubscribe.
But that's only my use case.
Ah, and +1: I don't want to keep emails. If I don't want to retain some information, then I just delete it -- there's no search algorithm in sight thats accuracy is independent of the search space. More emails, items -> less effective search.
That and some general common sense has added up to me being bewildered when people discuss how difficult email is.
I really hope that doesn't come off as snarky, because it's not meant to be! :-)
If I need something, I just search for it. As the Gmail search is really, really, good, I can pretty much instantly bring up any thread. I therefore don't see any value in spending even a second of time in trying to organize a piece of email. I also really like the "Social" and "Promotions" tabs Gmail added, it's like a smart filter for "unimportant stuff" that I don't even need to bother looking at but can search for if needed. I look forward to Inbox automating and highlighting actionable items even more (check in for flight etc, should just be a button press without even opening the email).
I would rather apply a label, or mark a message as unread (this is what I typically do), if it is something I need to return to later. Most emails can either be directly acted upon, or don't require a followup at a later time, so optimizing the common case down to "do nothing" makes sense for me.
As a result, I end up missing or not doing things, and re-reading emails I've already done, and my inbox is just a big chronologically-ordered mess.
This is my personal email anyway. My work email I'm a little more careful with, but it also piles up over time and rarely something will slip through the cracks. Outlook's flag/reminder system is decent at least, so it's manageable, but it still at times feels disorganized and just not quite how I want it to be.
I think the key is to use one system consistently, and to have a concise view of your current open items with minimal manual effort.
If you just keep everything in your inbox, it means you need to click on a button to sort by starred emails. Also you need to star any emails you need to work on. Most of my emails take a while to respond to - I like to think about them for a while before responding. With your method I wouldn't be able to do that - I have to either respond to all my emails after reading them, or else star all my emails as 'needing work' until I have time to respond.
Keeping only a few items in my inbox that I need to work on is the most efficient way of working, at least for me.
This is also the reason I've never been able to use any 3rd party email clients and rely solely on gmail in the browser. Search is so much faster/better when done directly in gmail.
I'm curious to try Inbox and see if it provides a useful added layer of aggregation of messages above and beyond the current "conversations."
People are working on that.
Google's new categories help and Inbox sounds promising but I feel like there's too much assumption going on in parsing the emails.
Really, I'd like email addresses to be on the domain level. For example, mail@cool_username.gmail.com and flights@cool_username.gmail.com. Then, give me granular control over how "mail" or "flights" get categorized and give me nested categories.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-m...
As for the per-category addressing, you can add "+flights" to your username when subscribing to flight notifications and then filter on that however you like...
For example, I'd love to be able to add a rule so that certain "deal" emails (those to which I'm purposely subscribed) to expire after say 1 day or 1 week - whatever the standard time for the sender's deals to typically last.
Then on the occasion that I end up in the woods, whether literally or figuratively, and unable to maintain my email for a couple days, I don't end up with an overwhelming and generally self-perpetuating inbox debt
I mean, searching for "vpn" doesn't give me the mail that contains "openvpn"? Or it's that incompatible to my workflow that not even RTFM works...
I also do the Inbox Zero thing, and absolutely love the overview it gives me of what I need to do. With Mailbox, you'll "snooze" mails and it'll be like they get delivered to you at the later specified time.
I recently sat my parents down, installed mailbox on their devices, and instructed them how to use the app. Amazingly enough, they now constantly use it, and aim for the zero inbox (they are people that would have to write down what ctrl-c does, and didn't know about ctrl-z...).
EDIT: If it wasn't clear; I'm also very satisfied my with mail flow :)
"Mailbox stores a subset of your emails temporarily in order to redeliver snoozed emails, provide fast delivery and provide push notifications. We encrypt all communication to and from the Mailbox app, and all information cached on our servers is stored in an encrypted format." [0]
[0] http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20stor...
I subscribe to inbox-0 because emails in my inbox need attention of some kind. I'm not advocating spending an inordinate amount of time organizing every email with labels and filters. Just "inbox == needs attention, not-inbox == I can safely forget about it".
Boomerang is pretty similar to some features of Inbox.
Most mail that matters come from specific people (close family, project members, current client...) so it's easy to search, the unexpected important mails and things that needs to be done later just need to be starred.
I feel it's really efficient when the signal/noise ratio is very low.
Personally, I didn't like archival at first, but now I'm quite addicted to it
Full Disclosure: I'm a Inbox Zero-er.
usually if I can't remember something - i usually don't really need to do that. I will definetly won't engage in this pseudo work.
Also how does this pass 20/80 test?
Well good on google. this sort of reminds me buzz they had. but I haven't played with this yet.
I found Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) a year ago, and it's been amazing for keeping inbox-zero (and my sanity). I average about 300 emails a day and most of them aren't immediately relevant. I then label them with their context(s) and boomerang them when I think they'll be actionable.
It's an amazing workflow, and I honestly think Google could just offer some type of "resend me this email later" (maybe even with a small note to myself) and would solve 90% of people's workflow problems.
I haven't seen Inbox yet, but it sounds like the "snooze" feature might solve this problem for many people.
Not entirely unlike how most corporations use Excel as their corporate standard database, although excel isn't technically a database. So email is not a ticketing system, but for us, it is.
A few hundred emails is not terribly unusual per day.
Filtering strategies are vital. Topic drift away from the subject line is strongly discouraged.
This is at one of the largest companies in the world.
I also tried to engineer a sort of self-destruction messages. The kind that are relevant for a day or few but don't need to be kept. I added the rules to mark those as "disposable" and once in a while i just nuke them from my inbox. This is still a manual step so it would be nice if something like a self destructive message label was invented in case el Goog is watching this
[0] http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...
My Multiple Inboxes are: Unread Inbox, Starred, Action/WaitingOn labels, Drafts and Unread (non-inbox). I had to add the last one as I was missing emails I hadn't read but had setup filters for. This deprioritizes them, but I still see them, and I can easily just mark them as read as they generally don't require much attention.
The other tip I'd say is learning the basics of keyboard shortcuts - I can open, assess and archive/delete an email very quickly because I use e/# (archive/delete respectively). I can burn through the unimportant emails very quickly that way.
That means I can have an even more focused inbox that just contains things I need to think about / respond to right now.
In comparison, I still use regular gmail for my work email and I have maybe a dozen emails sitting in there that I don't need to do anything about right now but need to follow up on soon.
IMHO, Inbox basically takes the stuff that inbox-zero folks had to learn to do manually, and makes a lot of it automated. It's particularly great on mobile.
But the manual intervention is precisely what makes my zero-inbox so effective. It's also agnostic to the device/application. If I leave something unread on a device it's unread somewhere else and vice versa. If one calls it "save for later", I don't know if that also means "unread".
IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now."
I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)
I don't do inbox zero, I do inbox 50k. I just let mail pile up--why not? It only stresses you out if you let it (I don't). Even with a million messages, it's instantly searchable with any decent mail client--and since it is standard IMAP you can use a bunch of different clients just like you use 3-4 different web browsers at the same time.
I have automated filters for stuff like Amazon that's key to my daily life but that I don't usually want to actually see, and the only manual organization I do is annual: I have folders like 2013, 2012, etc back to 1994 (containing all mail in and out). This started because in the old days clients bogged down with more than 20,000 or so messages in one folder. That's mostly not the case these days, but I like the yearly organization, and organizing my correspondence once a year isn't really too annoying, so I continue to do it this way.
I have routed all my faxes and voicemail to my email for 15+ years, too.
And it works on every device I own. For years and years and years.
I think email is about as perfect as computer tech ever gets. Usually instant (but tolerant of a multi-day outage), completely standard and future-proof data, that works on virtually every device and platform currently in use.
Email needs to be disrupted about as much as the hammer needs to be disrupted.
I read my email whenever I want. I spend time manually moving/filing/archiving my email about once a year.
:)
Some people use their inbox as a to-do list. Why they do this is beyond me. It's like making an alarm and flashing light inside your office and then putting the switch in a preschool.
SV is starting to look like 40 thousand really smart millenials sitting around looking for something useful to do.
Having said that, I'm sure Inbox is awesome. Google puts out good stuff. I'm just not so sure it's revolutionary or even significant. But that's for the market to decide, not a bunch of schmucks on the net.
The only thing I also do is intentionally leave e-mails I still need to respond to, as unread, and keep my inbox sorted with unread e-mails at the top.
It works great. The only thing that annoys me is that most (?) e-mail clients automatically mark an e-mail as read as soon as it's opened. I'm constantly pressing "Cmd+U" in Gmail to go back to the inbox, while leaving the item as unread.
Large % of emails are newsletters, notifications, offers and promotions. This is not spam (I think we have got that under control). These are the things you intentionally subscribed to and "nice to know" but not important or urgent. Email clients are utterly oblivious to identifieng and ranking them (Gmail's Priority Inbox is rather dumb baby steps).
Replying to threads and quoting previous replies is a pain. Threads become too long with several different colored highlights all over.
There is no easy way to control your membership in email conversation. It's hard to get out and hard to get in. Creating groups is high friction. Sharing previous conversations with someone or a group is non-practical.
Most email clients rank emails using date time. You can say that 70% of the human generated content uses perhaps most naive ranking algorithm. It is mind boggling that we still don't use signals like age of conversation, length, participants, topic, embedded action items etc. Even in 2014, most email clients will happily push email sent at 9AM for your house on fire after the benign Groupon promotion sent on 10 AM.
Emails are free form and there are poorly defined standards standards to add structured data such as reminders and action items for recipients, auto-expiration, callback number etc.
You can't share your "like" or upvote/downvotes for emails sent to a group. This severally limits how much social expression can be attached to emails flowing within a group.
I had an inbox zero policy before that was a thing. It's the only sane way to deal with email.
Count today: ~100 work emails. Most take less than a second of time. Some, require <1 minute to reply. The outliers are the ones that require me to do actual work beyond email but those are luckily usually communicated otherwise.
But I still have my "offline" archive of data on my laptop, which I then backup once a month too. (Thanks TimeMachine).
FWIW, I really like it, and use it exclusively for my work and personal accounts. Inbox functions very much more like a ToDo list than it does an email client. Here are the workflows I have:
Work:
I filter all mailing lists into different clusters that I have appear at 7AM every morning. I then scrub through the subject lists to see what happened yesterday, pinning things that require my attention, and then sweeping the rest. At this point, everything pinned in my Inbox is now "something I need to look at". I then read the email, and decide if it has an action item or not. If it's actionable and I intend to do it today, I'll leave it pinned. If it's not something I'm going to do today, I'll Snooze it until I think I'll have time to do it, or at least evaluate another Snooze time.
To make sure I don't miss important emails, I have a cluster that I put all email that has myself explicitly in the To: line, and have that appear whenever anything arrives. I do occasionally miss things that didn't have me in the To: and went to my 7AM clusters, but this is few and far between, and I hazard happens less than my Gmail inbox where I had far more cognitive load on managing the emails there.
Home:
The defaults are tuned well for home, and I use the clusters (like Travel, Purchases etc) like I do for work, having them appear at 7AM each day. Most things get swept immediately, and again I pin things that require my attention and are maybe ToDo items.
Inbox is really opinionated about its workflow: if you struggle against it, you'll have a bad time, and you'll prefer Gmail's flexibility. However, if you are Inbox Zero or GTD minded, I think you'll love Inbox. Inbox is my ToDo list, and replaces Wunderlist/Things/Evernote/Google Tasks for me. I set reminders to myself for work items that don't have an email attached.
I encourage everyone to give it a week to see if it suits them, but I'm afraid I'm all out of invites for now :(
Two apps using the same backend data (you can switch between Gmail and Inbox if you like) seems a better fit.
As I see it, it lets people wanting to try the new thing do so, but has zero effect on people happy with what Gmail does now who don't want to be distracted either by more option clutter or the features themselves.
Further, it lets people wanting to use the new workflow do so without clutter from the regular Gmail interface (and being a more focussed interface is the key "interesting feature".)
Edit: "Across" in the sense that everything comes in one workflow, and isn't two separate workflows. I dislike having to back out and select a new account to see each set of emails.
Weird that Mailbox/Dropbox manages to do it with Gmail, but Google doesn't.
But a 'advanced options' ability with a stern warning would be useful to many.
Got the invite for my google apps account, tried to sign in and was denied - because it was a google apps account.
My review of Google's new Inbox, based on two hours of use (thanks [redacted] for the invite).
First the good parts: 1. I really like bundles. The idea that I can "Sweep" all the promotional emails I get in one click fills me with glee (and marketers with anxiety, I imagine). It's also nice to have all the travel related emails in one place. Never again am I going to be confused whether I should be going to SFO or SJC.
2. I like the new compose. My emails are too long (both those I write and those you do), and I'm praying that showing just one line to write a response will make emails briefer.
3. Snooze/procrastinate: How I like the idea of "someday". Combined with my own future discounting, I'm not going to feel guilty about not responding anymore.
The not-so-good parts:
1. Boy is this opinionated software! There is an inexorable push to empty your inbox. I guess I'll like it if I get with the program.
2. It's too pretty. No, seriously. The title-bar is too bright, there are too many people's faces, too many colors and font styles. I like my email drab so I can focus on what people are saying and not get distracted by the colors.
That's all I see with two hours of use. Oh, also, I don't know how to invite people yet. If someone tells me, I'm happy to invite y'all.
edit: formatting.
https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6067582?p=invite_req...
Once you get Inbox, you'll have invites to send to your friends. Here's how to send an invite:
1. Open Inbox. 2. In the bottom right, go to the Create button . 3. Choose Invite to Inbox .
If you could do that for me, I would be grateful! (banderon1 "at" gmail "dot" com)
Thanks, Alex
If you can spare an invite, I'd be glad to try it out: ozhozh at gmail dot com -- thanks in any case.
Thanks,
I would really appreciate an invite at inglor at gmail dot com?
I can not imagine what'd happen if it doesn't work all of the times?
I like the colors aspect though and and would love to try it out.
If you still have some invites left send out one to a.tom.mindan@gmail.com
#. I hate Bundles. I rarely if ever have more than 5 emails in my inbox. Hiding things from me is counterproductive.
#. WAY too bright and big. Regular gmail fits 3x as much information in the same space, and I was already unhappy with how bright and big regular gmail is.
#. Love snooze. I've been using boomerang for ages.
#. No idea where the compose-suggestions are coming from; they're for people I haven't communicated with since before gmail even came out.
#. In general, just feels very clunky compared to Gmail.
Its from the create (+) button, but I don't think you necessarily start with invites right away, and I don't think it shows the Invite option after you hit the create button unless you have invites.
At least, I'm assuming that's why I've never seen the invite button in my Inbox (app or web) even though I've seen the instructions on the support page.
On the plus side, it only took me a few hours to get an invite from Google just by emailing inbox@google.com.
bertrand dot chardon at gmail dot com
Thank you very much.
ToDo's based on emails, chat, sms, (or any other msg obj) and metadata based filters are very useful.
I created dozends of advanced filters in GMail in 2006, as my first account grew to 5 GB (thanks to about 20 of mailing list) in 2009 my GMail account got unbearable slow. I had to create a new account (the advanced filters are still there, but there is no intuitive UI anymore, you have to type in their syntax). I occacionally login to my old account and it is still dog slow - so I have my doubts that advanced filter scale in GMail/Inbox.
my username is my gmail
This is very important. I've started using Evernote, and thought, "I really want to keep track of what gets done and who is doing what via email, without adding any complexity or forcing others into a system." I hope Inbox does this for me.
That's exciting to hear, since I've recently started turning Mailbox into a combination email client/to-do list/evernote replacement. I've found that having all those concerns in different apps meant that I never wound up using any of them often enough.
The shared concern seems to be the triaging of things that hit an "inbox" of sorts. Email hits the literal inbox, to do's hit my "stuff I need to do" buffer, and notes hit my "categorize these notes later" buffer (I compulsively note things down for later). Ultimately triaging things as their hit the Mailbox inbox is most effective for me, so I've turned it into my single source of triaging.
I'll definitely give this a shot if/when I ever get an invite ...
It appears to be sorting and arranging various bits of data. The examples shown include messages, and a flight reservation. What all kinds of data bits DO integrate? Does this read my email (or replace it)? Does this read (or replace) the news feeds of my social networking accounts? Where did it get that flight itinerary? Why is everyone in this video talking a selfie every two seconds, is Inbox sharing or managing photos for you?
I think this supposed to be an improved version of Google Keep, perhaps with some hooks into Gmail and your phone's camera. But all I have to go by is a few paragraph of fluff, and a 60-second video of young people staring down at their phones. Feel free to fill in the blanks, if you picked up some more solid information that we're missing.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/22/7041227/google-inbox-hand...
I don't know what that whole "overwhelmed by email" issue is all about. If you are getting 100+ emails a day and believe these are all relevant for you, you either work as some sort of a customers service rep or there is something wrong with your life/priorities.
I work in marketing for PC hardware, so very different sort of workflow to coding.
I, for one, am looking forward to the Poochie rap!
My quick thoughts on the iPhone app:
Good overall. It's just as good as most of the new line of productivity focused apps that have been released (and acquired) over the last year.
My quick thoughts on the web interface (inbox.google.com):
This is where it's really shining for me. Finally email doesn't feel like a spreadsheet with buttons anymore. It feels like Gmail should feel in 2014. Now that I've started using this, it would feel painful to go back to normal Gmail. You just kind of have to start using it to understand, but I really like it.
All of the new features (reminders, pinning emails, bundles, and one-button archiving of bundles like promotions and forums) are great . I've used almost every new feature already and they all feel like a natural part of a flow.
The only nitpick I have at the moment is the integrated chat in the web interface. It's defaulted to the Hangouts style chat, which I'm not a huge fan of. In old Gmail you have a choice of using the normal version of chat or Hangouts chat, and I've always turned off Hangouts chat. I really wish you could do that here, but I'm not seeing an option for it and my guess is there will never be one.
Overall however I'm really happy with this new version of Gmail and will continue to use it everyday.
I mean I get it... but it still feels stupid to do something like that, worse to sit through it and realize you're not watching to be informed by substance, you're watching to be convinced by style.
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
inbox@inbox.gmrservice.ext.google.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the relay gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com by gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com. [2607:f8b0:400e:c04::e].
We recommend contacting the other email provider at postmaster@gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com for further information about the cause of this error.
The error that the other server returned was:
550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that
550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more
550-5.2.1 information, please visit
550 5.2.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6592 j1si1502294pdb.1 - gsmtp
We also ran into a recent difference in the way sparse JS arrays as handled. We use sparse JS arrays for some data structures, but array.splice(0) on Chrome runs much faster than FF when using this to clone a sparse array.
There's no intent to exclude Firefox, engineers are staying late in the office working on it.
Instead, you could just notify the user that performance may not be as good on other browsers for now.
"There's no intent to exclude Firefox", it just turns out you've done that for like 2 major product releases in a row along with a giant flashing button suggesting that the user downloads Chrome. I'm not stupid, you don't have to lie to my face.
Try typing this into a JS Console: var xx = []; xx[30000000]=42; var yy = xx.slice(0);
It took almost a week to track down this problem where FF was taking 13 seconds to startup. We've spent a lot of time working on this and it is always in the cards to support this on all the other browsers. We've fixed tons of bugs and have gotten closer to it working the way it should, and people have spent countless hours staying very late at the office to try and finish a polished FF release before the deadline, and we just didn't make it in time. I spent the past 5 years of my time working on open web stuff.
Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong. This was a "mobile first" designed app, it's not designed to promote browsers of any stripe, it's designed to promote an experience for gmail users. If we really wanted to shit over a platform, why bother with iOS? Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.
What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience?
Or feature detect this problem and serve some type of notice.
If bleeding-edge Chrome is the only browser good enough for this site then it's a problem with the site's architecture.
> Any insinuation that this is an attempt to sell Chrome over Firefox is just flat out wrong.
Maybe not you in the engineering team, but the designers / PMs who decided to stick a "install Chrome instead" banner definitely had it in mind.
> Firefox has such a large user base, it can't be ignored, just like iOS can't.
That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop.
It's not just a degraded experience as in 'turn off this feature', the bug in question affects the entire infrastructure of how the app works, since it is part of the message passing and serialization mechanism used. It's legal, standard, JS, that just happens to run slow.
In this case, a workaround is available, and it is already fixed, but not shipped, because we froze commits some time ago for launch.
> That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop.
You mean like we didn't ship support for Android tablets? You would have thought with the big Android Lollipop and Nexus 9 launch, we would have made sure this worked there, right?
Maybe you should think about Hanlon's Razor as an explanation.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963
There's also this earlier bug that seems related:
Try it yourself: http://canhaz.azurewebsites.net/ http://www.browserstack.com/start#os=Windows&os_version=XP&b...
That said, it's clearly possible to do this fast _and_ correctly (e.g. IE manages this).
But as a note, some V8 folks would like to remove the buggy-but-fast thing completely. See https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3612#c2
Is there a point of contact for rendering/paint performance issues? We've had problems in Chrome where we had to work around excessive invalidation/paints, but those were diagnosed by using Chrome's layer/paint debugging tools and talking to Blink engineers, things may go quicker if when we encounter problems, there's someone we can email for help or a fix.
What VerGreeneyes says is true for our JS engine, too: you can always file bugs in our bugzilla (in the "Core/ JavaScript Engine" component). We react to such bugs very promptly (as you can see in bug 1087963[0] which was fixed six hours after being filed) and, in many cases, can uplift patches from Nightly to Aurora and maybe Beta, so they'll reach release builds more quickly.
If for some reason you're not comfortable with filing a publicly visible bug, you can also abuse the flag for filing security-sensitive bugs. That way, we may be better able to help with issues affecting unannounced products.
For asking questions or getting our attention even more quickly, you can either join us in the #jsapi channel on irc.mozilla.org, send mail to dev.tech.js-engine[1], or send mail to one of the SpiderMonkey engineers directly. A list of these engineers is available at [2], or you can just email me at [my nick]@mozilla.com.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963 [1] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Modules/Core#JavaSc...
I'll make sure we file bugs as repro-case-able issues come up, but if we get stuck on a deeper mystery, we may need some more direct help. We've made a lot of progress, and from a logic and speed issue, a lot has been resolved and mostly working, but animations are janky, and from "subjective" speed point of view, it unfairly makes FF look bad. Based on previous experience with Chrome, hitting the sweet spot of 60fps is usually where the JS developers need help from the rendering engine folks.
Does "will work on FF" mean "FF will eventually be supported"? Because today we see: "Inbox only works in Google Chrome. More browsers coming soon. Download Google Chrome."
I suppose I could see how this would be useful if you're using your smart watch or your phone and only want the most important facts, boiled down to their essence. (But then, doesn't Google Now already do that?)
Outside of that context, it doesn't seem like you'll ordinarily have both Inbox and Gmail open at the same time, because (as far as I can see) Inbox is just a way of better organizing and presenting the underlying data, whereas Gmail is more like the raw feed.
I am looking forward to trying this out.
I'm really looking forward to having a more intelligent layer around email. It's a great messaging protocol but up until now it's been mostly contextless.
I don't see email going away anytime soon and projects like this just confirm its usefulness.
For those who haven't seen it yet take a look at Google's email schema stuff: https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/
[0]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...
The chrome browser vs chrome os search overlap is just awful as I found out this week.
This worked for all of two days for me. Now, a week later, my inbox is once again packed, with nothing being moved or deleted, just read. That's just a flow that seems to work better for me. My to-do lists that I actually need to pay attention to are in other places... I'm looking at Jira to see what needs my development attention and in what order, for example. I'm pleased with treating my email as a giant bin where everything gets thrown, but can easily be fished out again given the need.
While I imagine this is all dependent on just how much email you actually get in a day, systems like Google Inbox seem useful to me at first, until I realize I'm no longer following the system, or I'm spending too much time deciding on where an email should be filed instead of simply acting on it and moving on with my life.
I was curious about the relation between Inbox and Gmail. My current Gmail has a lot of filters and labels.
When looking at the labels, you have the choice of displaying them as "Clusters" in your main inbox, which is pretty convenient.
I did that to my Friends label and it is now a Friends cluster.
Note that it doesn't change anything in Gmail: the label is still here, all the filters that interact with it are still here too.
I realized that one of my friends wasn't in the cluster, so I moved it in it, and clicked on "Always do this", it prompted me : "Always move emails from Myfriend@email.com to Friends" . 2 remarks about this:
- This is a very basic way of adding some emails from bundling, in the future I except to be able to specialize more: for instance sometimes I get important emails from a co-worker, but he also sends a daily reminder that I don't care so much about, I would like to be able to move it to the bundle “Useless updates” only it comes from him AND has this specific subject. That is something we can do through the Gmail filters, but not through the “Always do this” interface yet.
- Curiously it created a filter in my old Gmail filters with as a rule : " from:Myfriend@email.com Action: " The filter has no action, so I assume that when I will be receiving an email from that friend , in Inbox it will go into the good cluster, but in Gmail the label "Friend" won't be appended to it, this means that Gmail rules/filters apply to Inbox, but Inbox rules don’t apply to Gmail.
The Inbox's "Done" is doing the same thing as the Gmail's "Archive" .
I haven't been able to experience the snoozing feature yet
Instead of email, I think Inbox is an effort to finally (FINALLY) improve GTasks by marrying it into Gmail and Google Now. GTasks is woefully lacking. My recent switch to Trello has absolutely revolutionized my work flow, more than I thought possible. Inbox's autotasking looks like a big improvement on the dumb list, but it still doesn't look like a real competitor to Trello's kanban system.
(One last plug for Trello, just because using it for an hour has turned me into a wild-eyed fanatic. It's AMAZING. Try it!)
But i'll shortcut it and just offer an existence proof, since you can find all three pieces with creative searching:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id905060486?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
:)
If you pay for Google Apps, you get shafted. Nice.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/6082718?rd=2
Since I only use my @gmail.com account for spam and have my own domain for personal emails, guess this is a no go for me. I was considering switching back to a personally hosted mailserver for privacy reasons anyway, would have liked to try this though.
(And as a single-user apps account I don't even get the recently-released unlimited storage...)
Simple was the worst offender-- I should have known with the multi-year wait, to be capped off by bigoted comments from a cofounder to me on twitter (about an unrelated matter. But hey, your CxO makes a bigoted comment- I'm no longer your customer!)
But it's not just Simple, it's google with the wave invites, google with the gmail invites going back when, google with the orkut invites, google with the Plus invites, etc.
No more, Google.
[Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to Inbox or Gmail]
Blog Post: email inbox@google.com to try it.
..I got a good chuckle.
I'm interested but I keep seeing that this sort of stuff never takes into accounts things such as mailing lists (a la mailman and such). I hope I'm wrong.
Oh well, I still really want to try it. So I clicked the invite link that makes me use gmail (the app I'm replacing) to send an email. However, it's not a standard mailto link but a link to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=new . Seriously? Now I have to type in an email address because Google failed to use one of the most primitive features of HTML. So far my email experience has only been less convenient.
Anyway, I uninstalled it from my phone. I'll just wait a year or so to see if it flops like several of there other products and then maybe install it.
Inbox by Gmail: the Facebook of email.
What the hell, what kind of inbox-policing is that? How about "I don't understand why people would ever want to use a Mac, IMO the window management buttons should always be on the right side"?
People have different tastes, different workflows and different use cases. Is that really so hard to understand that you need to call this "the facebook of email"?
What, really, is the difference? I see many of Gmail's changes as the automatic equivalent to rules/labels and they have a massive sample set to base it all on.
I don't want to have to bother creating rules for every Kickstarter I back, mailing list I join, marketing email that's just useful enough not have me unsubscribe.
The Priority Inbox does a 99% perfect job of sorting the emails I actually care about. Occasionally (once every other month), it misses something, but a quick scan of the "everything else" box usually, which I do anyhow, has me catch that.
That's the kind of algorithmic sorting that I want more of.
This one at least is solved for me now, since most list software implemented RFC 2919 a few years ago. Lists should include a list-id header, so just write one rule "if mail is to a list named foobar, file it in lists/foobar". Or if you don't care to separate them out, even just "if mail is to a list, file it in lists".
Most people (who nowadays carry lot of personal/group communication around facebook/whatsapp) still get a lot of mails on product deals, newsletters etc. Email is also the tool for login, password recovery and for other utilities like that. Beyond that its the primary tool to do the most important thing : send a official mail to whoever concerned. May be to the president of country or to the school principal. Reducing the noise into this core tool should be of importance. Facebook/Whatsapp has take out a big chunk of casual and group communication, which is good. Something that could keep out the product marketing out of email could be of next good change.
I think the movement should be towards reducing the unwanted content in emails, than organising the unwanted.
Oh sure, I know they want to build the End-to-End plugin for Gmail (the service they are trying to make obsolete), which they know only a few people will use. But this is an opportunity to start from scratch with end-to-end security by default.
The number of emails I have written to or received from friends is negligible and I am not aware of anyone heavily using email for private communication. Everybody just calls or writes a SMS or uses WhatsApp or Facebook or ICQ, but never email.
So am I - and the people I know - a rare case or did just nobody advertising email related stuff recognize that no one uses email for private communication?
If I could just get my sixteen year old to email me instead of text, I'd be very happy.
By emailing, it removes the cognitive step of working out how to contact someone - it just works. Yes, I'll use text or Facebook for certain things with certain people, but email is something that just works with everyone.
Trusting an AI (or algorithm in this case) to sort your email and bubble up different aspects is a huge task, and I'm glad to see Google finally start putting their full might behind it.
I was specifically referencing the scene where Sam is noting key points about the various things in his inbox and organizing it for him. Of course the movie title is possibly one of the most generic words out there, so finding a link to share is non-trivial :)
The snooze functionality takes a page from Baydin's boomerang service. However, this is where I'm still not sold. I've used Baydin's boomerang service for nearly 2 years now. I use it on approximately 80% of the messages I send. Inbox gives you the ability to "snooze" messages, but not "boomerang". I think it's much more important to be able to bring an email back to your inbox when someone hasn't replied to it as opposed to snoozing a message to take care of at a later date/time. I've come to the point of not understanding why you would even attempt inbox zero without boomerang. It blows my mind that email has been around for this long and we're still relying on a third party app to achieve this functionality. For anyone unfamiliar, Boomerang allows you to set a message to come back to your inbox if a person does not reply to it in 12 hours, 2 days, 4 days, or any later date you choose. I started using it for business, but then I realized how much it helps with everything. I use it on most personal emails now as well. Let me give you a real world example: 3 people on an email chain, everyone agrees we need to meet one day next week. The last email of the chain someone suggests, "Are you guys available next Wednesday at 10:00 AM?". In a world of inbox-zero without boomerang, this message may go unanswered if everyone on the chain forgets to reply (very common in my world). For a boomerang user, I set the email to come back to my inbox "if no response" in 2 days. This way, if there's no response, I can send a follow up, "So are we meeting next Wednesday or not?" I still can't figure out why this hasn't been built in to more email services by now.
Anyways, coming back to Inbox. It's beautiful, cool, great on mobile, but I will not be able to use it as my main email client unless they allow 3rd party apps like boomerang. Or, for the love of technology, build their own functionality that brings no-response emails back to the inbox! Am I the only one?!
Obviously, human errors occur in a more traditional approach where you use an e-mail client, calendar, and todo application. However, it would be interesting to see how accurate such machine-learned approaches are, compared to manual methods for information management.
It would seem like Google would get more REAL traction with this if they made it available to Apps for Work customers. Every single one of my business domains uses Google for email.
Business folks use productivity solutions more than individuals, I'd think. I don't understand why they don't target us first??
The only people I give my personal @gmail.com address to any more, are ones I don't want to be bothered by, in my main mailbox.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999814
[2]http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/07/mit-and-dropbox-alums-launc...
I'd love to see a better base protocol with a clean extension mechanism and a culture of documenting and publishing such extenstions. One can dream :)
If you connect via IMAP, you get all your email as usual. It's up to the client to do things like set calendar reminders from emails or whatever.
If I had to wager on it, I'd say it's going to happen. User adoption is a powerful metric.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2837812/zoho-nips-at-google-i...
I thought that things like having a text editor that allows me to reliably do complex things like typing and pasting without losing my place, or perhaps a compose window that can be resized, really mattered. Since Gmail doesn't have either of those, maybe Inbox will add them :)
Maybe Google Outbox will end up being amazing.
Or am I just misunderstanding the feature and do I just have to mark individual email as done one by one?
also the spam inbox (what they are trying to label as offers or something on gmail) is not part of the priority inbox.
besides that, and all the smiling happy people in the Ad, all i could grasp is that they added lots and lots of white space around each message to compensate for the humongous size of that phone screen.
I can understand why google don't want to push this on large organisations in case it results in expensive support, but as a paying google customer It'd be nice to have the choice.
"E-mail - a list of messages from people, by default displayed in the order they arrived." Isn't that simplicity refreshing?
On topic... Looks a lot like Mailbox. I'd be worried if I was Mailbox.
It's to bad Google Keep only has an internal API (that isn't available to us)
That doesn't attract me for some reason.
There wasn't anything about the experience that wouldn't have been as well served by a normal scrolling page with animations activated by a click.
* Folder and Rules (with the only distinction of having some pre-populated ones, I think)
* Some smart content extraction from known emails (reservations, invoices, etc...) - probably going to be a privacy nightmare
* Todo and reminders ( what's new about this? outlook/gmail calendar/thunderbird-lightning all do this)
* Snooze for reminders - yeah...
Finally!
Can't wait for the invitation.
> Once you have an invite, you can hover over the red create button and you will see a gold ticket - Invite to Inbox. Select that to enter your friend's email address and send the invitation. > Quick note: if you received an invite from a friend today, your 3 invites to share won't be available until this Friday.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/gmail/nCtyOEbZH...
So it has open and auditable secure end to end encryption?
Do you think a Google employee is going to come in here and answer "yes! we'll break it hard!"?
Do you think anyone here actually has the answer? Most don't even have access.
It is mostly annoying that Google introduces new features that they apparently don't care about making work for their paying customers.
In what way do you think Now is broken with GApps accounts? I use Now with GApps, and don't know what you're referring to.
I have an entire GApps domain that I can't even turn Now on for, and I have no idea why.
Edit: Ahh the standard HN, "someone said something about Google that isn't glowing" flag instinct. Sorry that my experience with Now has been negative and you don't like that, flag away. Amusingly, the video comment (id=8493719) was flagged down into the negatives rather quickly, partially recovered and is continually being flagged.
When I get hit in the face with these cheap emotional ploys that feel like an early 2000s Microsoft Zune ad, I get distracted from the actual product being touted. My resistance goes up.
Does this approach work for anyone? If you really are a Williamsburg hipster, I'd expect this kind of pandering would feel off-putting. If you're not, it's alienating.
There's certainly a place for emotion in ads. But how about a bit more product, and respect for our intelligence?
Apple is a more inherently hipster company that (I'm guessing here) has a large hipster marketshare. It's known for being hipster, so the link is already there. No need for ads like this to form that link to try and capture the twenty something crowd that wants this lifestyle.
Hacker news is full of people that value function, results and optimised workflow, which are essentially all that matters with an email app. So this form of marketing is lost on them :)
(does email is cool, and happy?)
I only use email if I know someone doesn't use or check Facebook very often.
I'm sure you'll get 20 VC funds camping on your lawn for the chance to fund that one, but that says more about them really.
Such ads make less sense when you have too-happy hipsters dancing in a park about the latest Windows edition, admittedly. But showing ads in the context of their use and probable demographic seems reasonable.
It also looks so confident that I thought I (31 years old) wasn't in their demographics anymore, and given I'm used to a Gmail interface which was invented in 2006, it may soon be going out of the door, but that's an inner fear of me which is talking.
> Young urban people fit that demographic a lot more than a suburban commuter would, since that lifestyle comes with a pretty set routine and a limited variety of schedules
Yeah, no way a person with three kids and a full-time job has a hectic schedule.
Take for example Google's "Material Design" in Android L, you can read all the articles you want, but the concept won't make sense until you watch a video of the animation/transitions/etc. There are a lot of products/ideas like that. They say an image is a thousand words, and this isn't a sixty thousand word article.
I think it is silly to suggest that people who prefer video content over an article are "less intelligent." Instead those people want to get an idea of how the product would actually work in reality rather than just eating up all the carefully crafted marketing language within the article.
This is why unboxing videos and amateur product demos are so damn popular on YouTube: They actually give you a true-to-life idea of how a product would be. Articles are too carefully crafted, and seeing the product without the person interacting with the product is only 1/2 the message or less.
After a bit of introspection, I think the turn off is the cheap emotional ploy that you will somehow gain a lifestyle from using their inbox filtering app.
You know, after finishing a shift on your kickstarted-funded peruvian food truck, you can go practice with your band and take selfies.
For me, it would be far more effective if they showed me how the product would help an average everyday person.
Does the typical email user have an inbox which is half empty? Do users just read email that seems exciting? Do users want to just glance at their email periodically?
No really, think about it. It's just email.
inbox@inbox.gmrservice.ext.google.comAnyone knows what that "rate limit" is?
Email started simply as a way to send digital notes around the office. But fast-forward 30 years and with just the phone in your pocket, you can use email to send your most intimate thoughts, feelings and sexual fantasies to an undisclosed warehouse in Utah where our expert systems will analyse it for signs of emerging criminality, non-normative behaviour or just any juicy information that we can sell to some dude who's willing to pay.
With this evolution comes new challenges: we get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when you use encryption. For many of us, dealing with encryption has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do - so we decided not to use it and to make sure that your email is always stored in plain text so that we can read it easily and hand out copies in bulk to all our friends, associates and subcontractors.