[pferde]

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.

[jasode]

>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 should read the 1 billion pages himself to determine which is most important to his search query.

There are not 1 billion emails in an inbox but any number of messages greater than a few hundred is the equivalent in information unmanageability.

It's an inescapable math problem. If you only have ~16 waking hours a day, you may only be able to realistically dedicate ~4 hours to reading and responding to emails. Your allocation of that finite time is a zero-sum game. The math problem: the outside world can stuff more unimportant emails in your inbox than you have the human capability to read and curate. Therefore you must have a robot "reader" assist you.

[slx26]

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.

[jasode]

>, 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."

[praseodym]

Just as scary as having Google filter out mail that is totally not important, i.e. spam?

In Gmail you can (un)label email as being important, which will then train an algorithm just like a spam filter. Besides that, it will learn to recognise email you reply to often as being important.

I very much like this feature; I set up the Gmail app on iOS to only send me push notifications for important mail. For me that strikes a good balance between no distractions and not missing out on important email.

[lmm]

Yes, spam filtering is scary. The first thing I've done with every email account I've used is turn any black-box spam filtering down to the minimum (gmail was the first that wouldn't let me turn it off entirely, and it took a long time before I trusted gmail for anything important for just that reason).

Filtering into "email that I want a push notification for" versus "email that I'll read in a few hours when I check" makes sense. What I don't get is people who are using this as a way to divide into emails they'll read and emails they won't read. Given that genuine spam is so rare these days, any email that gets as far as you gmail "unimportant" inbox is an email that you in some sense requested; if your inbox is full of mailing lists and newsletters that you don't read, wouldn't unsubscribing be a better route than filtering them out?

[raverbashing]

Yes, and it's been really due in gmail https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/03/29/the-road-to-fogbug...

http://onoffswitch.net/fogbugz-priority-prediction-naive-bay...

[stephenr]

Spam can be removed by objective filters, that simply classify the email against known patterns/rules. Who you are or what you like is irrelevant to them.

This is not that: it's you, giving a giant personal information sponge, a bigger tap.

[loup-vaillant]

> Spam can be removed by objective filters,

Those "objective filters" prevent me from sending email from home (I have to relay through a non-residential IP).

I receive about a dozen spam email per day (with occasional surges and lapses). My server accepts everything, and a simple local filter from my mail user agent (Evolution or Thunderbird, mainly) let few through, and false positives are very rare.

I'm not sure why the giant providers need to work any differently.

[Yetanfou]

A dozen spam messages per day? Lucky you. I did a tally on yesterday's harvest on my server and found the following:

- 57 rejected messages designated as spam by SpamAssassin

- 137 greylisted messages, most of which will end up being spam as those addresses which I communicate with regularly will be in the whitelist.

- 181 connection attempts blocked at the gate due to protocol violations (most of them due to fake HELO, usually trying to connect using my own server's FQDN)

- 144 delivery attempts blocked at RCPT due to the use of blacklisted recipient addresses. This is why using recipient-specific sender addresses makes sense when communicating with commercial, organisational or governmental institutions: it makes it possible both to track down who leaked or sold addresses to spammers as well as to block those addresses entirely.

This domain has been handling mail for close to 23 years now, the server is used daily by about 8 people, it also forwards mail for a few others.

I generally don't see more than one or two spam messages per week in my actual INBOX.

[loup-vaillant]

Ah, 8 people. If we remove the protocol violations, we get (57 + 137 + 144) / 8 = 42 spam message per person per day. Between 3 and 4 times my amount. I may be lucky, but frankly that doesn't sound extraordinary.

I also get no more than 1-2 spam message per week in my inbox.

[halflings]

What new giant personal information are you giving, really? If you use Gmail, you already trust them with your emails and the interactions you have with these mails.

This features makes the experience better for users without having to give any additional information.

[pferde]

Yes, if you're using Gmail, you've already lost, but this IMHO inappropriately affects your workflow by steering your attention to, or away from, certain e-mails. To me, it's potentially no different from what Facebook was caught doing, and in fact, if done carefully, it is an authoritarian's wet dream.

Yes, you can (supposedly) train the "importance" filter, but how many people will do that?

[joshuamorton]

Literally everyone? It's trained based on the emails you respond to.

[verletx64]

How many things are we supposed to do as people? Everybody touts options spanning every domain going from email to mobile devices and it's like, oh it's just a bit of configuration/tweaking for a few hours and then you're good to go.

So yeah, hand holding is good, because to be honest, I don't get up on a Saturday morning and say "oh boy I can't wait to setup my email filters, right after I tweak my Arch Linux install and add a few more lines to my .vimrc!"

This sense of being looked down upon for relinquishing control over things that to be honest, I don't care that much about is just annoying after a time.

[pferde]

I kind of get what you are saying - there are lot of things we should not be caring about and let automation take care of. But in my opinion, what is and is not important to someone is something deeply personal, and I find it scary that someone would want to relinquish control particularly over that.

I see it as "can someone tie my shoelaces for me please?" level of non-responsibility. And it scares me.

[Gigablah]

The important question here is — why do we still put up with the archaic busywork of tying shoelaces?

I loved driving stick shift, but I’m not sorry to see it go either.

[salvar]

Surely that's a cynical interpretation of "important"? We've seen examples in this thread where important can mean "not spam" or "not random newsletter", yet you hold on to the one meaning where users are asking for their shoelaces to be tied for them because they are so irresponsible.

[joshuamorton]

To provide another perspective: I don't think I've ever received an email where an incorrect categorization is more than a mild inconvenience. From my perspective, it's relinquishing control over a triviality. Categorizing things that in the grand scheme are all unimportant anyway.

[rocqua]

"important mail" is the reason I stick with gmail.

It allows me to have notifications only for stuff I probably care about. It helps cut down on the crap. At the same time, no e-mail is urgent. If things were urgent, contact me some other way. I check my non-important email roughly daily but no guarantees.

My point being that important e-mail doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be close enough that I probably care about the notifications, and don't miss too many notifications.

[achamayou]

An important feature of Gmail from the get go was how well it separated Spam from relevant email. I don't think you'll find too many users who prefer to do that manually.

It's a matter of degree of course, but scary seems too strong a word.

[pferde]

Yes, up to the point of marking legitimate e-mail from personal domains as spam, even though such domains were set up correctly, including stuff like DKIM or SPF.

Also, the wording was "... and what can wait for later", which doesn't sound like spam was meant - I don't think people keep their spam messages and read through them later, e.g. over the weekend. :)

[achamayou]

Maybe I'm an exception, but I do scan through my spam from time to time :) Partly to see if I've missed something, but also because it can be amusing.

I agree that spam detection is not an exact science, and that it is in fact quite subjective. It's also quite valuable!

[pferde]

Yes, I do that too, for certain class of spam that did not score high enough in my spam filter solution to warrant automatic removal. :) But that's about 5% of total spam I get.

[pmlnr]

Right, because hiding without letting people know they have something is spam is good. /s.

It's not. This is how and why people keep missing actually important email, because friend X changed their email address for reasons, but they are not in the contact list, so it must be spam/phishing.

[stephenr]

As I mentioned elsewhere: spam can be filtered objectively, but importance would have to be identified subjectively.

[achamayou]

Can it really though? If my ISP, who I've exchanged emails with before or sends me my bills starts to send me promotional material about some TV bundle, is that spam?

Conversely, if someone I've never exchanged emails with before, but who got my details through a third party wants to discuss a business opportunity, is that spam?

If you define spam narrowly as "unsolicited", then sure, it's somewhat objective (although even then, you have to work what was solicited in ways other than an initial email). But there's quite a bit of subjectivity involved in the more useful and generally accepted definition.

[spookthesunset]

> "spam can be filtered objectively"

"Objective filters" (by which I assume you mean "rule based") can easily be worked around by the people trying to get through the filter. All you gotta do is figure out the rule and bam, you are back in again.

Sure it might work for your tiny little family domain name with your tiny 10 mailbox email server. No spammer gives a crap about you. But when you are on the scale of gmail, you will have a lot of people whose entire purpose in life is getting through your spam filters. "Objective filters" turn into a continual game of whack-a-mole. Put in a rule, wait half a day until somebody works around that rule, put in another rule.... repeat ad nauseam.

"Objective Filters" don't scale at all. They might filter out the riff-raff script kiddies but anybody whose livelihood is based on getting past your "objective filters" will easily overcome them.

[fooker]

How does this magical objective spam filter work?

How can that same technique not be used for marking important emails?

[pferde]

Because of the word "objective". Different things are important for different people.

[primitur]

This erosion of responsibility over time is some sort of back force from a wave of generational disillusionment.

We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.

We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.

Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.

[lists]

I like this because most social media functionality save for some exceptions (Snapchat, Telegram, etc) can be implemented over email

[xoxoavi]

Back in the days (probably 2014), Gmail had a method to show Important emails which kinda worked. But I think my intention in this recommendation was about reducing the notifications people get for every email and helping you understand what urgent (since the AI reads your emails anyway). But I understand it could escalate wrongly very quickly

[swiley]

This sort of thing is how we ended up with facebook’s ability to mass manipulate people.

[userbinator]

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