Smartbox by Inbox by Gmail by Google | Hacker News Reader

Smartbox by Inbox by Gmail by Google

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I feel as if google's april fools jokes get progressively worse every year.

The thing about April fools jokes is that they need to catch you unaware but since Google does this every year it doesn't seem too surprising.

This is worse than PigeonRank?

Although worse, they almost had me for a split second there. It's when they mentioned temperature and apps that I finally gave up...

That said, a "smart"/connected mailbox isn't a terrible idea.

I remember the time where they were using April 1st to release real products... Like Gmail.

I'm wondering if they could genuinely pull one impossible-to-believe-btu-real service each year for an April 1 launch date?

A lot of the announcements they have made on April 1st have turned into real projects

such as?

The only one I remember was Gmail and it was brilliant. It was something like 2GB of storage which at the time was mind-boggling. And they added the cool ticker which continuously added even more storage.

Lots of us really believed it was a 4/1 joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_hoaxes_and_east...

Well, it seems like this is doubling as a promo for "Inbox", which I hadn't heard of before today. It seems similar to unroll.me.

The first part of this -- the ability to check whether there is mail in the mailbox -- seems useful.

There seems to always be something in my mailbox though hardly anything useful. I liked the sort-out and/or zap for junk concept. Specially during election season.

Yeah, when I saw that I thought "oh, useful!" except for the fact that I always at least have some junk mail which would ruin it.

I wish I could just completely opt-out of physical mail, but the USPS won't allow it: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...

I never even realized Outbox had died out; I just assumed it was another one of those "indefinitely US-only for now but we'll expand real-soon-now" services.

If the USPS didn't like their business model, why didn't they just try to start with some other country? I would love to get this in Canada, for example. (We have a half-assed attempt at this in the form of Canada Post's "epost", but it only does bills by partnering and prearrangement, rather than actually scanning anything.)

I wish I commented frequently enough on HN to have earned the downvote button by now...

I feel like the only proper way to treat April Fools jokes is to bury them.

Even then, there is no downvote button for submissions - only for comments.

Duly noted!

That's just wrong, there is a flag button just like there are for comments.

The downvote button and flag button are separate buttons.

I believe the downvote button is unlocked at 500 karma.

It seems there is no downvote button for stories, per the FAQ.

That said, I wouldn't flag this, just try to push it off the first page. People can share what they like.

Google has crossed a threshold where it loses more goodwill than it gains with these lame April Fools jokes.

I don't get it, the post is clearly dated March 31st.

Also, now I'm wondering about that Amazon button thing.

It's been April 1st for a whole 14 hours in Australia. Mabye they are going of a different time zone.

If they waited until midnight in California, it'd already be near the end of the workday on April 1 in Sydney and Tokyo

Read the title: "The mailbox of tomorrow, today". They probably do need to get it out there into the world as it becomes April 1st somewhere on earth, but that doesn't prevent them from using that as a meta-joke.

Now, of course, I will just avoid HN and any other source of news in English for the next 30hrs or so...

So it begins... Prepare yourselves brethren

I want that in my car

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