Sorts messages according to the first line
Which would be really helpful if most I get didn't start with "Hi Fred".
Or if the link posted were not usually some afterthought joke unrelated to the main point.
Email has been around for better than 40 years – but Google thinks you just can't handle its fiendish complexity. And lo, the web king has developed an application dubbed Inbox to make an easy job easier. Google Inbox Inbox from Google, for when plain email just isn't enough "We get more email now than ever, important …
Honestly, why don't you luddites go back to using Pine (or Elm)... maybe setup UUCP via dialup while your at it. Sheesh...
I've just started using Inbox this morning and it's a fantastic app because of it's simplicity & ease of use.
Also, being inundated with email was getting tedious and in short order, inbox tamed, well, my inbox.
It's an excellent app. I have an Xperia Z so Inbox's storage/memory footprint isn't a concern.
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Read the article and watched the video, so what is new about this? It looks like a scheduler to me, but again, I'm not sure if it's any different. With the video you get to see the options for the timers, which are not very reasonable (to me at least). Remind me in a hour, tomorrow, next week? Well those are only helpful if you seem to fit into a very linear lifestyle...very.
BTW, I assume that ~30MB of the 36MB total are only for research purposes, because that's huge for something like this, or am I thinking too 90's here?
"It seems the more pixels we get on our devices, the harder the UI designers work to waste them."
On the other hand, a nice, usable interface might be a little more useful than a 240*135 character text screen that has a a 6 inch diagonal, assuming your device 1920*1080.
Once they determine how best to remove every function of GMail you hold dear and how to sort your mail in confusing and useless ways, they will promptly make this the mandatory new GMail UI.
Every new Google UI that has come out in the past 3+ years has broken something or taken away basic functionality.
On the other hand, they're trying new things as opposed to sitting on their zillions. Buzz, Wave etc may have failed, but GMail is hugely successful and was a whole paradigm shift at the time (no folders? Searching the archive? Madness!). Their Priority Mailbox interface (optional) is just awesome, the most useful UI addition in years, makes my email about three times more efficient.
So, let them play and try new stuff - they sometimes come up with something actually progressive, or take the gimmicks and keep the best bits.
> but GMail is hugely successful and was a whole paradigm shift at the time (no folders? Searching the archive? Madness!)
Seriously? The appeal of gmail was first and foremost the absurdly huge storage capacity with the lightweight UI taking second (while still significant) place.
Things like moving all your emails into one folder (ooh that's a difficult innovation) and searching them (could we not do that already?) never got mentioned by anyone because they really didn't care.
Other webmails had tiny mailbox capacity, this one was vast. No 'paradigm shift' bollocks required.
Yep, the big mailbox ('never delete an email again' as they said at the time) was a come-on, but part of that was to *not* get in the habit of having to delete emails from your 50MB email account in order to receive another one. That's a shift of habit. The number of times a mail might fit in 2+ folders, but can be easily labelled 2++ ways made a difference to not having to be heirarchically organised. Made no difference to you I assume, did to me and clearly many others.
'Priority Mailbox' - again, nobody else trialled stuff like this, and they did. And it's excellent. Maybe it's a bit complex for joe punter, so this looks like a simplified version with some additional features more suited to casual users. The folder tabs for social/adverts/personal was another idea they tried - it sucks and I got rid of it (because you can get rid of things you don't like if you prefer a big bucket of email). I don't love everything they do, but at least they're trying new stuff. Outlook.com is not a huge leap from hotmail, which didn't evolve massively from day 1 (yep I had a 4-character hotmail.com ID back in the day).
If things don't change, they don't get better. Some change is good, some is bad. Some people like to work with a copy of outlook express/similar on a 100MB POP3 box, using folders, deleting mails, being tied to a single machine, losing their mail history periodically. Personally I'm fond of trying new things and using the ones that work for me.
Priority inbox? How does this differ from a mailer that highlights messages from people in your address book, coupled with a function that people you reply to are added automatically to your address book? Mail software has been doing that sort of thing for decades.
One of the things that bugs me with GMail is that they have taken the basic email interface, removed half the functionality, and renamed what was left. Instead of mailboxes or folders or something, we have "labels". It's the same thing, only with a confusingly different name.
Why, when I send a message, does my sent message not appear in the thread until some (random?) later time? That bugs me too.
"GMail is hugely successful"
GMail *was* hugely successful, then they bodged a bunch of useless crap onto it and keep making it harder to handle email in any way not all full of Googly Goodness. The only reason many people have a GMail account now is to use the Google Play Store (Maybe they'll make it a Real Store someday).
"One very useful feature is the ability to quickly set up emails to reminder you about meetings, dinner dates and other stuff that's about to happen."
"Reminder you"? Really? Is this just the result of a mischievous spell-checker, or has yet another noun been turned into an utterly unnecessary and redundant verb?
(The reverse phenomenon is just as stupid, and just as "epic"* a "fail".)
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* In a TV commercial for Pizza Hut a year or so ago, a pizza box was described as "epic". A pizza box! Not even the pizza itself; just the friggin' box!
Clearly the word "epic" has lost all meaning in general, popular use.
My deepest gratitude to all who have replied. I only just now discovered all your comments.*
It's nice to know I am not the only vox clamantis in deserto!
(And to see a Monty Python reference! My thanks to Midnight for the lovely "remind"!)
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* It would be nice if El Reg were to add a comment-reply notification feature. I believe that's on the list.
This sounds very similar to automatically sorting things into folders using rules and categories - which many email clients and mail servers already do. Sure, the look and feel will be slightly different and it should require a bit less user input - but I don't think that calling it 'new' is entirely justified...
How about Google pushes the industry to standardise the HTML and CSS allowed (or not) in an email?
Then EVERYONE sending an email can make sure it's formatted to convey the message on whatever device displays it.
If email really still is relevant (and I think it is), then why the fuck this hasn't been done long ago, I just can't fathom.
Browsers are now, by and large, accurate and consistent, why not the same for email renderers?
Fun though that idea is, you really don't want auto rendering of HTML in email, even though most clients will do it. MS reused explorer in Skype and forgot to disable JS. Oops.
Text (especially ascii) is easier, safer and more efficient to store index and search. Procmail with HTML? No thanks.
"Text (especially ascii) is easier, safer and more efficient to store index and search. Procmail with HTML? No thanks."
But what if the thing you need to convey is beyond words, like a picture (a thousand words, etc.)? Or if it needs to be in a specific format, like a table? At least an HTML table can accommodate for flow for, example, in a narrow display. I've yet to see a text-only table (which has to be hard-formatted) that can reflow itself easily and arbitrarily. HTML by itself isn't the problem, it's the interactive elements added to later versions. If e-mail were forced to not accept HTML tags from versions higher than, say, 2.0 (or basically the highest version without an interactive element), then all you have to do is warn against the basic hyperlinks that are left.
As for the whole concept, I happen to know people who get lost with this technology (their idea of high-tech is a typewriter) yet still want to learn how to use these new devices. catering to the technologically-illiterate at least is not all bad, unless you're the type who think the wired world is a Wild West where only the bold should enter, and if you're not up to it just die somewhere...
Er, the industry don't need pushing, we've already standardized:
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
It's not an "official" standard, just what works in what clients, and is plenty sufficient to develop HTML emails. The problem comes when someone tests their emails in web browsers and get surprised when things like <style> tags don't work; check the chart before you start designing.
Simple solution: don't put any HTML in email - it's a letter, not a colour brochure. If you want to send me something else then you can attach other media to the letter, which I can view on a PC or tablet, but don't make it hard to quickly view the message on a low-spec phone.
Except attachments are a bug-a-boo now, thanks to malware e-mails, some of which HAVE been able to disguise themselves as innocuous files. No, I want them up-front in a sanitized environment (which attachments can't provide), thank you.