7 ms·

Dan Ariely Tries to Fix Email (2017)

49 points by rfreytag 8y ago

qnsi 8y ago
Wish we could see something like this in gmail. I spent some time at a sales position and working with email has always been hard
- prlambert 8y ago
  Could you be more specific? Which features would you like to see?
  - c_r_w 8y ago
    For what its worth, I am currently looking at ProtonMail again because I find "suggested replies" too creepy. It is actually stressful, at the "increased heart-rate" level, to see those and be constantly reminded I have no privacy at Google. Gmail is the best email client IMHO but suggested replies may finally drive me away.
    - s3r3nity 8y ago
      I might be a minority, but I actually like this feature, as it has saved my ass a few times already in terms of replying to emails from my boss / boss's boss, so I'd vote to have it be optional rather than have Gmail remove it. (Edit: it looks like you CAN turn it off in the settings.)
      - c_r_w 8y ago
        I actually would assume the usage stats would be very good on the feature. I am not sure if you can turn it off on the web, I will look again. Unfortunately it is a bit of a Pandora's box situation; just knowing it is happening is the problem. That said, out of sight, out of mind. As much as I like to think I'm driven by principle, I haven't stopped using Gmail yet.
        prlambert 8y ago
        You can disable Smart Reply from the mobile apps, the setting isn't there on Web yet. Honestly we just haven't prioritized it yet. Here's some info on how it works if it helps address your concern: We've transformed the language generation problem into a labelling problem. From a systems point of view it's not any different from spam filtering, or tabbed inbox, and we use the exact same features. Smart Reply uses a whitelist of around 30k independently generated & sanitized phrases. You could think of each whitelist entry as a label. So when an email comes in on the delivery pipeline we just label things, like we've always done. We label (spam/not-spam) for spam filtering, we label (promo/social/update/forum) for tabbed inbox, and we label (Thanks!/Sounds good!/etc/etc) for smart reply.
        c_r_w 8y ago
        Thanks very much for the reply, that is very interesting. It is really a very smart feature, and I cannot explain rationally why that is the one thing that pushes me over the line into "this is too creepy." Do you record what responses people choose? If so is that data used to personalize the responses or just stored in aggregate?
  - s3r3nity 8y ago
    The #1 feature I've been looking for is just manual sorting of threads in the inbox and/or folders (via drag-n-drop or the like.) This was such a sneaky-good feature with Mailbox (before Dropbox shut it down) and solves a bulk of my priority / triage problems with email. I've surprisingly had a difficult time finding any other client that can do this. ...Though, knowing HN, I'm sure someone probably has one up their sleeve =)...
    - jorisw 8y ago
      FWIW, I do this in Mac's Mail.app by assigning different colors of flags, and sorting my inbox by flags, then received date. This allows me to have business actionables on top, then personal actionables, then unfiled bills, then new incoming messages.
      - s3r3nity 8y ago
        Ah interesting - I should try this! I'm a huge fan of Mail.app, but my biggest frustration is that the colored flags don't carry to my iPhone (the latter of which only has one color flag in the Mail app.) My other response is that I'm big on stack-ranking tasks / priorities, so your flow would be great for personal stuff, but not best for what I need for work.
        prlambert 8y ago
        Have you tried multiple inboxes in gmail? You can create custom sections for specific labels and then sort your incoming mail into them (using keyboard shortcuts this can be really quick). For example you can have inbox sections: Starred P1 P2 P3 Inbox (new/untriaged) You can also use 'super stars' to accomplish multiple priority states within starring. Here's an example of a real power user: https://medium.com/@gregsramblings/how-i-tamed-gmail-at-work-a0bd66a17a63 https://medium.com/@gregsramblings/how-i-tamed-gmail-at-work...
      - jorisw 8y ago
        To illustrate: https://jor.is/mail-flow.jpg https://jor.is/mail-flow.jpg
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> In this data, Ariely saw an inefficiency to target. Even though every email, by default, triggers a notification, it’s unlikely that any given email deserves one. So, with the help of some software developers he’d worked with in the past, he tried to come up with a way to tweak the default settings that are baked into email. The result of that work is Filtr, an app that lets users make simple rules, based on the sender, about when an email will show up in their inbox. For example, users can set it up so that emails from family members show up immediately, but non-time-sensitive newsletters show up all at once, at the end of the day. Again... Google is already trying to do this for me. No, thank you - I can easily set up there rules for myself.
- close04 8y ago
  Just wait for that time when your (free) email provider will temporarily insert the newsletter in your "alert me immediately" rule. Anything that can be offered for money will be offered for money. I hope I'm being too cynical and pragmatic.
  - bena 8y ago
    I don't think you are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2h2K6D1V8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2h2K6D1V8
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > I hope I'm being too cynical and pragmatic. Take a look at the comments in the thread about Huawei cheating on benchmarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931549. TL;DR: yes, they're doing it, yes everyone else is doing it too, has been doing it since forever, and it's not just phones, it's PC GPUs as well. You're not being too cynical. The world is just fucked up.
    - lylecubed 8y ago
      The world isn't fucked up. The world operates the way it operates. It's your expectations that are fucked up. Human beings love resources (money), power and control. Anything that gives them that can and will be exploited. Approach the world with that in mind and you can anticipate the vast majority of these issues. Game designers do this all the time without worrying about being "cynical".
bo1024 8y ago
This is cool, but feels a bit frustrating because the design of email means this was always easy to do. People just use poorly-designed interfaces/mail handlers. I wish it was titled "...tries to fix the way we interact with email." I guess I wish the focus was on how email, as a basic underlying protocol, allows you to overlay whatever interface you want to match your productivity, and an example of how we can take advantage of this. Generally the UIs we use are designed by large companies to help themselves, only tangentially to help us...but if we stick to open and simple protocols, then we always have options available.
xte 8y ago
I think there is a different problem: people do not know how to use email. 1) people do not know how to properly quote messages 2) people do not understand that mail are quick "mail", not chats 3) people do not know that mail are not file sharing solution Personally I have inbox zero via notmuch-emacs, and I use mails for nearly anything feeds included (RSS2Email) mails are automatically filtered on remote via IMAPFilter and I can refile locally if needed but I try to avoid doing so to have more "automatic" solution. A proper taxonomy + a proper full-text and tag search are the solution, all messages locally under our control. Unfortunately for most there are ZERO modern MUA, only webmails are developed so most people are stuck with '90-era client and so leave their mailboxes in a messy state or leave their message on someone else server without any real personal backup. I think this is wanted by many "big" that prefer proprietary platforms with various lock-in like webmails or even more "new things" with much more lock-in from Discourse to Slack, Disqus, Whatsapp etc. ALL of them are a limited proprietary solutions trying pushing people out of emails.
- cmiles74 8y ago
  The automatic quoting that email applications perform gives me a headache. 90% of the emails I receive require no quote, yet contain like 20 levels of indented quotes from the chain of messages that add nothing but noise. Modern mail readers already chain the messages together, but are not perfect when it comes to filtering out the quotes. In my opinion, people should be more involved with the quoting of the previous message. Perhaps the customer could highlight the part of the previous message they want and have that become the quote. Or maybe a button when we write an email that will pull in the messages we're responding to as a quote.
  - bklaasen 8y ago
    > In my opinion, people should be more involved with the quoting of the previous message. Perhaps the customer could highlight the part of the previous message they want and have that become the quote. Or maybe a button when we write an email that will pull in the messages we're responding to as a quote. Thunderbird supports that. Highlight the part of the original message that you want to become the quote, and hit 'Reply'.
prlambert 8y ago
(I'm the PM on Gmail for intelligence and filtering) Based on Dan's research we built a new gmail feature: high priority notifications. It only sends you a push notification for really important messages, cuts out over 90% of Gmail notifications for most users. https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-a... Importance is defined by a model trained on reply rate and a few other engagement metrics. Edit: High priority notifications is now available for both Android and iOS, contrary to what the link I included says
- icc97 8y ago
  Non-AMP link: https://mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email https://mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Hi prlambert! Could I run a few Gmail bugs/feature improvements by you so you could run them by someone if appropriate? I've struggled to find a way to contact the Gmail team. - 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!
User23 8y ago
The major problem with email is that computers scale wildly different than people do. If one were to print out all one’s new emails and put them in an old style physical inbox it would immediately be apparent how ludicrous the situation is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the relatively higher cost of paper office memos actually increased organizational efficiency by limiting junk and noise.
CalRobert 8y ago
Is email even broken? Seems fine to me. I'd love to use it more, actually, over the abomination that is Slack and constant notifications and distractions. 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.
- aaronarduino 8y ago
  One way that email is hugely broken for the industry I am in is the inability to send attachments exceeding 25mb without using a file sharing service. If that could be fixed I'd be happy as a clam.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    No one should be using e-mail as a file transfer protocol. There are better solutions for that. I’m glad I could help fix that for you!

49 points by rfreytag 8y ago

qnsi 8y ago

Wish we could see something like this in gmail. I spent some time at a sales position and working with email has always been hard

prlambert 8y ago
Could you be more specific? Which features would you like to see?
- c_r_w 8y ago
  For what its worth, I am currently looking at ProtonMail again because I find "suggested replies" too creepy. It is actually stressful, at the "increased heart-rate" level, to see those and be constantly reminded I have no privacy at Google. Gmail is the best email client IMHO but suggested replies may finally drive me away.
  - s3r3nity 8y ago
    I might be a minority, but I actually like this feature, as it has saved my ass a few times already in terms of replying to emails from my boss / boss's boss, so I'd vote to have it be optional rather than have Gmail remove it. (Edit: it looks like you CAN turn it off in the settings.)
    - c_r_w 8y ago
      I actually would assume the usage stats would be very good on the feature. I am not sure if you can turn it off on the web, I will look again. Unfortunately it is a bit of a Pandora's box situation; just knowing it is happening is the problem. That said, out of sight, out of mind. As much as I like to think I'm driven by principle, I haven't stopped using Gmail yet.
      - prlambert 8y ago
        You can disable Smart Reply from the mobile apps, the setting isn't there on Web yet. Honestly we just haven't prioritized it yet. Here's some info on how it works if it helps address your concern: We've transformed the language generation problem into a labelling problem. From a systems point of view it's not any different from spam filtering, or tabbed inbox, and we use the exact same features. Smart Reply uses a whitelist of around 30k independently generated & sanitized phrases. You could think of each whitelist entry as a label. So when an email comes in on the delivery pipeline we just label things, like we've always done. We label (spam/not-spam) for spam filtering, we label (promo/social/update/forum) for tabbed inbox, and we label (Thanks!/Sounds good!/etc/etc) for smart reply.
        c_r_w 8y ago
        Thanks very much for the reply, that is very interesting. It is really a very smart feature, and I cannot explain rationally why that is the one thing that pushes me over the line into "this is too creepy." Do you record what responses people choose? If so is that data used to personalize the responses or just stored in aggregate?
- s3r3nity 8y ago
  The #1 feature I've been looking for is just manual sorting of threads in the inbox and/or folders (via drag-n-drop or the like.) This was such a sneaky-good feature with Mailbox (before Dropbox shut it down) and solves a bulk of my priority / triage problems with email. I've surprisingly had a difficult time finding any other client that can do this. ...Though, knowing HN, I'm sure someone probably has one up their sleeve =)...
  - jorisw 8y ago
    FWIW, I do this in Mac's Mail.app by assigning different colors of flags, and sorting my inbox by flags, then received date. This allows me to have business actionables on top, then personal actionables, then unfiled bills, then new incoming messages.
    - s3r3nity 8y ago
      Ah interesting - I should try this! I'm a huge fan of Mail.app, but my biggest frustration is that the colored flags don't carry to my iPhone (the latter of which only has one color flag in the Mail app.) My other response is that I'm big on stack-ranking tasks / priorities, so your flow would be great for personal stuff, but not best for what I need for work.
      - prlambert 8y ago
        Have you tried multiple inboxes in gmail? You can create custom sections for specific labels and then sort your incoming mail into them (using keyboard shortcuts this can be really quick). For example you can have inbox sections: Starred P1 P2 P3 Inbox (new/untriaged) You can also use 'super stars' to accomplish multiple priority states within starring. Here's an example of a real power user: https://medium.com/@gregsramblings/how-i-tamed-gmail-at-work-a0bd66a17a63 https://medium.com/@gregsramblings/how-i-tamed-gmail-at-work...
    - jorisw 8y ago
      To illustrate: https://jor.is/mail-flow.jpg https://jor.is/mail-flow.jpg

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> In this data, Ariely saw an inefficiency to target. Even though every email, by default, triggers a notification, it’s unlikely that any given email deserves one. So, with the help of some software developers he’d worked with in the past, he tried to come up with a way to tweak the default settings that are baked into email. The result of that work is Filtr, an app that lets users make simple rules, based on the sender, about when an email will show up in their inbox. For example, users can set it up so that emails from family members show up immediately, but non-time-sensitive newsletters show up all at once, at the end of the day. Again... Google is already trying to do this for me. No, thank you - I can easily set up there rules for myself.

close04 8y ago
Just wait for that time when your (free) email provider will temporarily insert the newsletter in your "alert me immediately" rule. Anything that can be offered for money will be offered for money. I hope I'm being too cynical and pragmatic.
- bena 8y ago
  I don't think you are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2h2K6D1V8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2h2K6D1V8
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > I hope I'm being too cynical and pragmatic. Take a look at the comments in the thread about Huawei cheating on benchmarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931549. TL;DR: yes, they're doing it, yes everyone else is doing it too, has been doing it since forever, and it's not just phones, it's PC GPUs as well. You're not being too cynical. The world is just fucked up.
  - lylecubed 8y ago
    The world isn't fucked up. The world operates the way it operates. It's your expectations that are fucked up. Human beings love resources (money), power and control. Anything that gives them that can and will be exploited. Approach the world with that in mind and you can anticipate the vast majority of these issues. Game designers do this all the time without worrying about being "cynical".

bo1024 8y ago

This is cool, but feels a bit frustrating because the design of email means this was always easy to do. People just use poorly-designed interfaces/mail handlers. I wish it was titled "...tries to fix the way we interact with email." I guess I wish the focus was on how email, as a basic underlying protocol, allows you to overlay whatever interface you want to match your productivity, and an example of how we can take advantage of this. Generally the UIs we use are designed by large companies to help themselves, only tangentially to help us...but if we stick to open and simple protocols, then we always have options available.

xte 8y ago

I think there is a different problem: people do not know how to use email. 1) people do not know how to properly quote messages 2) people do not understand that mail are quick "mail", not chats 3) people do not know that mail are not file sharing solution Personally I have inbox zero via notmuch-emacs, and I use mails for nearly anything feeds included (RSS2Email) mails are automatically filtered on remote via IMAPFilter and I can refile locally if needed but I try to avoid doing so to have more "automatic" solution. A proper taxonomy + a proper full-text and tag search are the solution, all messages locally under our control. Unfortunately for most there are ZERO modern MUA, only webmails are developed so most people are stuck with '90-era client and so leave their mailboxes in a messy state or leave their message on someone else server without any real personal backup. I think this is wanted by many "big" that prefer proprietary platforms with various lock-in like webmails or even more "new things" with much more lock-in from Discourse to Slack, Disqus, Whatsapp etc. ALL of them are a limited proprietary solutions trying pushing people out of emails.

cmiles74 8y ago
The automatic quoting that email applications perform gives me a headache. 90% of the emails I receive require no quote, yet contain like 20 levels of indented quotes from the chain of messages that add nothing but noise. Modern mail readers already chain the messages together, but are not perfect when it comes to filtering out the quotes. In my opinion, people should be more involved with the quoting of the previous message. Perhaps the customer could highlight the part of the previous message they want and have that become the quote. Or maybe a button when we write an email that will pull in the messages we're responding to as a quote.
- bklaasen 8y ago
  > In my opinion, people should be more involved with the quoting of the previous message. Perhaps the customer could highlight the part of the previous message they want and have that become the quote. Or maybe a button when we write an email that will pull in the messages we're responding to as a quote. Thunderbird supports that. Highlight the part of the original message that you want to become the quote, and hit 'Reply'.

prlambert 8y ago

(I'm the PM on Gmail for intelligence and filtering) Based on Dan's research we built a new gmail feature: high priority notifications. It only sends you a push notification for really important messages, cuts out over 90% of Gmail notifications for most users. https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-a... Importance is defined by a model trained on reply rate and a few other engagement metrics. Edit: High priority notifications is now available for both Android and iOS, contrary to what the link I included says

icc97 8y ago
Non-AMP link: https://mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email https://mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-ai-filter-email
mehrdadn 8y ago
Hi prlambert! Could I run a few Gmail bugs/feature improvements by you so you could run them by someone if appropriate? I've struggled to find a way to contact the Gmail team. - 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!

User23 8y ago

The major problem with email is that computers scale wildly different than people do. If one were to print out all one’s new emails and put them in an old style physical inbox it would immediately be apparent how ludicrous the situation is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the relatively higher cost of paper office memos actually increased organizational efficiency by limiting junk and noise.

CalRobert 8y ago

Is email even broken? Seems fine to me. I'd love to use it more, actually, over the abomination that is Slack and constant notifications and distractions. 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.

aaronarduino 8y ago
One way that email is hugely broken for the industry I am in is the inability to send attachments exceeding 25mb without using a file sharing service. If that could be fixed I'd be happy as a clam.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  No one should be using e-mail as a file transfer protocol. There are better solutions for that. I’m glad I could help fix that for you!