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Google Inbox

googleblog.blogspot.com

131–140 of 472 posts

Re: Google Inbox

#131

Slightly off-topic, but can we talk about that video? I would love it if Google could just sell me on the idea of their products for once, instead of trying to sell me on a twentysomething Brooklyn lifestyle. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Inbox

#132
post #109
post #19

Congrats to Google on shipping! 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…

I seem to be the only person in the world whose email is only broken since forced to use GMail on a work account (and Thunderbird totally fails at using the IMAP thing). 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...

Search is hilariously bad in all email clients, including gmail. Google managed to solve searching on the web by just throwing enough information in it until you kinda always got what you wanted to know. But that doesn't work for email, because there just isn't more info to throw at it than what's in your mailbox. You need to actually have decent search algorithms. And those are apparently too difficult to write, since not a single mail client out there does it right. Grep does a better job.

Re: Google Inbox

#133
post #107
post #19

Congrats to Google on shipping! 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…

I also do inbox 0 the exact same way you do but sometimes it's not enough. For example, if an online retailer sends me promotions I don't care about, I'd like them to be auto-archived for when I actually feel like buying something, but I don't want to miss my purchase confirmations. Google's new categories help and Inbox sounds promising but I feel like there's too much assumption going on in parsing the emails. Real…

I filter all messages with the word "unsubscribe" in the body into a "Bulk Mail" folder that I check once a week, works beautifully.

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...

Re: Google Inbox

#134
post #74
post #19

Congrats to Google on shipping! 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…

I wouldn't say I have a problem with email as it is today, but I am the exact opposite of you; I never archive or organize any of my email (besides rules for labeling email lists and groups so they directly bypass my inbox). I appear to have 11,600+ emails in my Gmail inbox. 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 there…

I dumped the Social and Promotions tabs because they're always there to bother me. I have a "subscriptions" tag that any vaguely noisy mailing lists go into and I rarely bother to look at it, but it's there if I want to. Rarely = once a month, maybe.

Re: Google Inbox

#135
post #6

how does a company like Google not 'Get It' when it comes to email. Google++.

Are you serious? Are you saying Google, which has revolutionized webmail and is one of the largest and most popular email providers, doesn't "get" email?

I think they understand the needs of normal consumers and made a better product than hotmail/yahoo. But I don't think they have a serious offering for business. A well administered Outlook setup works brilliantly and does not sacrifice speed or features just so it can be a web app.

Re: Google Inbox

#136
post #19

Congrats to Google on shipping! 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…

Have you considered using Mailbox[0]?

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...).

[0] http://www.mailboxapp.com

EDIT: If it wasn't clear; I'm also very satisfied my with mail flow :)

Re: Google Inbox

#137
post #3

I'm definitely not the target audience for this and I really hope that Google isn't going to force me to upgrade to Inbox. Looking at you G+.

...and I really hope that Google isn't going to force me to upgrade to Inbox.

If I had to wager on it, I'd say it's going to happen. User adoption is a powerful metric.

Re: Google Inbox

#139

Slightly off-topic, but can we talk about that video? I would love it if Google could just sell me on the idea of their products for once, instead of trying to sell me on a twentysomething Brooklyn lifestyle. 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…

I felt like the text of the blog post did a pretty good job of explaining the goals of the product without much fluff. If guess if you're the sort of person who watches the video instead of reading the article, you get the marketing content designed for the people who don't read.

Video often gives you a better idea of how the product will feel to use, not emotionally, but dynamically.

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.

Re: Google Inbox

#140
post #19

Congrats to Google on shipping! 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…

To those who think inbox-0 is a waste of time, because you can just search for email, so why spend even a second organizing it: what causes you to remember to reply to an email sent to you 3 days ago, which is now the 119th email in your inbox?

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".

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