Dan Ariely Tries to Fix Email (2017)

- Say you have a thread with 1 important+read email from weeks ago, and 1 unimportant+unread email received just now. There is a bug in Gmail conversation view in that it will neither appear in the "unread" section nor in the "important" section. The entire conversation is deemed important, so it's categorized into the "important" section rather than the "unread" section, but the conversation doesn't appear at the top of the section because the new email isn't important; the conversation date is grabbed from the earlier message, which is pushed way off the page since that message was from a long time ago. The end result is the user sees a baffling "Inbox (1)" without seeing any unread emails on the inbox page. Which is at least noticeable if you're the kind of person who regularly has "Inbox (1)", but if you're the kind who has "Inbox (5198)" then there's no way you're ever going to notice that email.

- Sometimes I deem an email important, but I don't want it cluttering up the Important section after I've handled it. But marking it as not-important would send the wrong feedback. I feel like this might not be an uncommon use case. Do you guys have any plans to address it?

- There's no way to keep an email marked as "spam" while still moving it out so as to save a copy. It will automatically get marked as "not spam". Could you guys please have a way to look into this?

- Related to spam but unrelated to importance: There is a bug where, if you have a filter to "never mark as spam", it will also apply the Inbox label. This breaks other filters that "archive" that same email.

- Unrelated to importance & spam, but in the new version of classic Gmail (I'm NOT referring to the new Gmail here) changing conversation view reloads all of Gmail. This wasn't the case before. Any chance they could fix this? It would be awesome if they could also provide a way to change email importance per-message rather than per-conversation.

- Also unrelated, but while I'm here: any chance you guys could add a "send-now" button for Undo Send? It makes life easier for the few occasions when you really want to send a response immediately rather than in 30 seconds.

Thank you!

Where would you put that button? right next to the Undo Send link? Where, in the rare panic to Undo Send... it might be hit accidentally?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the relatively higher cost of paper office memos actually increased organizational efficiency by limiting junk and noise.

Also, it will never be focused on your needs if it's free. Just pay the damn five bucks a month for fastmail or protonmail, etc. Or roll your own server. You'll get a nice clean interface and nobody shoving crap like AMP for email (aka embrace, extend, extinguish) down your throat. In my experience the spam filtering on fastmail has been just as good as gmail.

And notifications are the devil. Does anyone else get a little angry when they see ANY icon with some dumb pip with a 99+ next to it? Or any number? I'll check it when I'm good and ready. Maybe I should get a physical mailbox that starts screaming at me every time the mail comes too.

I have a telephone for notifications and they're activated by people calling me (or text/signal/whatsapp, but I can mute those as I desire). They know to do it if it's important. Anything else can be async. Life is frenetic enough.

I realize I may be a curmudgeon.

1. Thanks! Let me know if you need additional info or can't repro, the last time this happened to me was a while ago (doesn't happen often since it requires subsequent emails to be far apart in time and categorized with different importance). EDIT: I just repro'd it again. The conversation ordering under the Important section is definitely based on the date of the last Important message rather than the date of the last message, so the conversation will fall out of the screen if the last important message in that conversation was a long time ago.

2. I use archiving for emails that I want records of, but that I don't want cluttering my inbox or appearing on my screen at all, unfortunately (like notifications about some activity on other sites). It's not the same thing as, say, a personal email or something from a mailing list that was unimportant but that should still get a little bit of eyeball time at some point.

3. There are a few use cases... sometimes I want to investigate why I got some spam after the 1-month period when it's deleted, meaning I want the message headers etc. to be there. Other times I want a filter that automatically keeps everything matching it because I might not be able to guarantee that I'll look into the spam folder every month, and I cannot risk losing some emails that way. (How do I respond when someone asks if I got their email and I don't have a copy to check?) I honestly think there's no compelling reason why whether or not an email is spam has to be tied to its lifetime.

For undoing, any chance you could address why "View Message" couldn't just send the email right then? It's impossible to undo afterward, so delaying after it's clicked seems entirely counterproductive, right?