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What happened, Gmail?

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Re: What happened, Gmail?

#161

Post by slx26 »

jasode wrote: post #71
pferde wrote: post #3

Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later." To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.

>To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox. The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he…

I understand the discussion, but then that's a very specific use case, which gmail is probably not trying to cover (and it might be a good idea that it stays like that). To be fair, I don't think that's even a good use for email. If you need help with selection from a wide pool of options, then you probably need a more specific tool.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#162

Post by HillaryBriss »

nukeop wrote: post #7

Material Design is one of the worst things that ever happened to the design of websites, not only Google's but everyone's, since now so many are trying to copy it. I have no idea why anyone would want to see it anywhere.

i always thought that it looked a bit childish, was not innovative, was not fully developed as a vision and was not particularly well-explained. it was like, from its very announcement, they were trying to imitate Apple, but not doing it very well.

and i can't help but wonder if these are the reasons why the new GMail UI doesn't work well for this article's reviewer: the GMail app team doesn't really have a clear design inspiration to work from either.

i never liked "Material Design" as a name either. they might as well have called it "stuff design" because, you know, it's designed to look like "stuff."

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#163

Post by jasode »

slx26 wrote: post #161
jasode wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox. The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he…

I understand the discussion, but then that's a very specific use case, which gmail is probably not trying to cover (and it might be a good idea that it stays like that). To be fair, I don't think that's even a good use for email. If you need help with selection from a wide pool of options, then you probably need a more specific tool.

>, which gmail is probably not trying to cover

The original programmer for Gmail back in 2001 was Paul Buchheit. The busy people (like his boss Larry Page) with overflowing email inboxes were the first users giving him feedback on how to make it work better for their productivity.

Auto filtering and smart threading are examples of "artificial intelligence" (so to speak) applied to email. Those features came from internally dogfooding Gmail before public release April 1 2004. Later, they added a feature called "Priority inbox" based on machine learning.[1]

What makes you believe Gmail isn't meant to help filter overflowing emails on behalf of the user?

[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

excerpt: "Many Gmail users receive tens or hundreds of mails per day. The Priority Inbox attempts to alleviate such information overload by learning a per-user statistical model of importance, and ranking mail by how likely the user is to act on that mail."

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#164

Post by userbinator »

pferde wrote: post #3

Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later." To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.

It will be interesting to see if/when Google inevitably marks a phishing email as "important" and the user gets phished.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#166

Post by roberttod »

I just went through my Inbox to figure out why I still use email.

For personal stuff, I think WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessages are clear winners. 90% of my emails seem to be marketing I'll never read or notifications I ignore. I try my best to unsubscribe, but email really needs maintenance to work nicely.

For work almost everything is Slack. Sales team and a few others still seem to use email for some reason. Email is vital for communication with clients and it's pretty good for a big announcement where you can then choose to "reply all" or "reply", not sure Slack solves that nicely with threads. Also email seems to be used for anything considered too important for Slack, but I can't see any good reason why it should be that way.

When you boil it all down, it looks like a lot of use of email is for legacy reasons, i.e. some people still insist on using it. There is legitimate usefulness over other options when it comes to communicating between companies though. Even if Slack figured out a way to fix that, they'd probably require the reciever to be paying for Slack.

I guess the ability to send a stranger a message is email's weakness and it's strength. Nothing out there has solved that yet.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#167

Post by axiomdata316 »

I feel with each Gmail "improvement" Gmail gets slower. I miss the days when Google’s priority was speed and not pretty. I feel less productive when I'm always eating for pretty Gmail to load and respond to actions in the ui.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#168

Post by freehunter »

8ytecoder wrote: post #154
tgb wrote: post #126

The author's experience with GMail seems to be the opposite of mine. The new features for disappearing/unprintable/etc. emails sound like they're just going to cause annoyances while Gmail sorting things into promotions and updates is absolutely fantastic . And I use the "forums" tab too. This is the "good method for telling users what they need to read" that the author wants - that's what Primary is. This is the way…

I have been using Google Inbox since the launch and I absolutely LOVE it. It finally solved my email problems. - I have notifications disabled for all but the important emails. So I respond to emails in time and I don't keep checking my phone anymore. - Easy to read and discard emails. Especially promotions. I actually do check them - once a day and once a day only and then delete them all. - Social/Updates ...etc ar…

My problem with it is that I don't trust it. Outlook does the same thing, I'm not singling Google out for this. Anything that automatically sorts my email for me, I don't trust it to get it right 100% of the time. And the last thing I want to do is a miss a critical email because Google or Microsoft told me it wasn't important to me.

Case in point: I run a website for my town and some user actions are sent to me via SendGrid emails. Not a lot, but maybe one or two per day. I've made the email subject descriptive enough that I rarely need to open them to know what happened. I'm guessing that because it's a mailer from SendGrid and that I rarely open them, my email provider decided that they weren't important emails and stopped sending them to my inbox. When I figured it out a few days later and went to check the other tab, I found a couple messages had been sent of people wanting to purchase ad space that the email provider had also decided wasn't important enough to notify me of.

So now I have to check both tabs religiously (in reality I just turned it off) because I can never trust that I'm not missing something.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#169

Post by criddell »

pmlnr wrote: post #158
hota_mazi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get off Gmail and get on... what? You're only offering non constructive criticism. Gmail is light years ahead of any other email client I have tried so far.

It's really not, nor the web client, nor the provider, and the options are plenty, mentioned even in this very thread. Fastmail, self hosted iredmail, protonmail, etc., are fine providers. Geary, rainloop, macos mail, k9, are very nice clients. Have you actually tried any alternative clients, before you made this comment?

I too would leave GMail (Inbox) if I could find a web client I like as well.

For work, I use Thunderbird because I need Enigmail for PGP and I absolutely hate it.

Inbox does an almost perfect job of catching spam and sorting my mail. It has saved me many hours over the years.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#170

Post by m-p-3 »

8ytecoder wrote: post #154
tgb wrote: post #126

The author's experience with GMail seems to be the opposite of mine. The new features for disappearing/unprintable/etc. emails sound like they're just going to cause annoyances while Gmail sorting things into promotions and updates is absolutely fantastic . And I use the "forums" tab too. This is the "good method for telling users what they need to read" that the author wants - that's what Primary is. This is the way…

I have been using Google Inbox since the launch and I absolutely LOVE it. It finally solved my email problems. - I have notifications disabled for all but the important emails. So I respond to emails in time and I don't keep checking my phone anymore. - Easy to read and discard emails. Especially promotions. I actually do check them - once a day and once a day only and then delete them all. - Social/Updates ...etc ar…

One feature that I use a lot in Inbox and that I hope will be ported back to Gmail are location-based snooze.

Being on a somewhat flexible schedule on multiple sites, I like to know I'll be reminded of an important email when I get to the relevant site, which can be unpredictable sometimes.

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