This will make me very, very happy. It matches almost exactly with my workflow for using email: certain people (customers) get written back as soon as I check email, other people get responses as time permits, and then I get some notifications which I don't typically act on but do appreciate having surfaced somewhere (e.g. "You sold something" or "Here's your receipt.").
This sort of feature always makes me sad that they announce features before rolling them out to everyone. Now I can't wait for it to show up in my account.
#28 of YC's Ideas They'd Like to Fund<p>"Fixing email overload. A lot of people, including me, feel they get too much email. A solution would find a ready market. But the best solution may not be anything as obvious as a new mail reader.<p>Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it."
This goes a few steps past just reading keywords out of my emails to place ads. This requires Gmail to have intimate knowledge of my emailing habits. While from the software point of view this is not scary, the "profile" data has to be stored someplace other then my machine and it makes me wonder who can read it. Will Google have to surrender my psychological profile upon a subpoena? This is sarcastic, but a real concern. Even if I somehow am magicked into trusting Google, no amount of magic will allow me to trust the government, and anything Google knows, the government has right to.
I hope that this improves their false-positive rate for identifying spam. If a message is borderline, I wouldn't mind it receiving a "low priority" tag instead of being auto-junked. My personal messages are usually classified correctly, but I need explicit filters to save Git and Boost mailing list messages from the spam folder. As a result, actual spam messages that were correctly labelled "spam" are archived instead of deleted, and I still waste time deleting scams and shams.
Ironic considering Eric Schmidt disputed the existence of communication overload fairly recently.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-future-and-theres-no-such-thing-as-communication-overload/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-mobile-is-the-...</a>
I run GTD-like system and I am not immediately attracted to this. To me, an email either "requires action" or is "done". Obviously, a lot of stuff goes directly into done (receipts etc.), but I would not trust automation with that I think..
I've been doing this sort of thing ever since they introduced the Multiple Inboxes lab feature. It wasn't Gmail's logic, it was my own in a series of complex filters. Here's a screen grab from February 2009: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/3257013239/sizes/o/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/3257013239/sizes/o...</a>
This is a BRILLIANT feature that I hope stimulates somebody on HN to build around Outlook.<p>GMAIL hovers around 5% of email client usage.<p>Outlook still owns somewhere between 35 - 43%.<p>MSFT was moving in this direction and had a decent solution out a few years back called Email Prioritizer.<p>Of course, they tossed before it made it out of labs.<p>Xobni is too complex IMO, what's so compelling about Google's system is how simple it is - it just works, it fits right in. Nice job.<p><a href="http://www.officelabs.com/projects/emailprioritizer/Pages/Default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.officelabs.com/projects/emailprioritizer/Pages/De...</a><p><a href="http://visibleranking.com/2010/05/most-popular-email-clients.php" rel="nofollow">http://visibleranking.com/2010/05/most-popular-email-clients...</a>
I need this to be integrated with the filters they already have.<p>For example, when my dad forwards me every joke that's ever been forwarded to him over the last 24 hours, I don't want them cluttering up my important emails. However, if he actually writes something (rare, but occasionally happens), than that's important. Integrating this with the filters would allow me to use the FWD: and FW: subject line tags to segregate his important vs his non-important emails.
I've had a <i>similar</i> feature (without the training part) in GMail for a while now. GMail Labs has a feature called something like "Multi Inbox". It shows other searches/labels of your choice on the front page. I set it up to show Drafts, Starred and a "To Do" label and have been running a system much like this shows, just prioritizing stuff on the fly. Given you can see drafts and such stuff, this might even be a better alternative for some.
Anybody else got the auto-playing music? For a while couldn't figure out where it was coming from, then I saw the red sign for the new Priority Inbox and at first selected "No thanks" but that did nothing, and not until I accepted to turn it on did the music stop.<p>A bug? or some Google's programmer idea of being "helpful" or "funny"? I did not appreciate it.
Awesome. Now can we do it on a local MUA (Thunderbird, Mutt…), or on an MDA (procmail…)?<p>I like to own the computers that analyse my personal data. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648400" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648400</a>
I use simple Outlook rules to automatically highlight emails from important people and friends...<p>However, this sounds like a "reverse bayesian spam filter" that instead of filtering out spam is filtering out "most important email" and learning over time ?<p>It shouldn't be too hard adjusting SpamBayes or similar filters to do this, should it ? Anyone know about any solution for Outlook ?
Don't know if this is the best place to bring it up, but I don't think "bacn" is a good word for low-priority email. There are a lot of passionate email users who are even <i>more</i> passionate about bacon.<p>There could even be a backlash.
After four drafts of my response, I think it can be summed up in one sentence: Minus the paranoia, murder, and mayhem, Ted Kaczynski might have been on to something.
I just use <a href="http://www.unsubscribe.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.unsubscribe.com</a> and it fixes my junk mail and mailing list problem once and for all.
Um. I use sieve to classify mail and filter into different folders. Sieve is about ten years old.<p>If Google announced that they were supporting the managesieve protocol and/or allowing people to edit sieve filters for their account through a web interface, <i>then</i> I'd be impressed.