

 Would you pay for this service? - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/05/would-you-pay-for-this-service.html

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michael_dorfman
No, I wouldn't. And I wouldn't use it, even if it were free.

The current system of labelling via filters gives me fine-grained control from
the very first e-mail. Machine learning will require a (possibly long)
training period, and may still then be prone to false positives and negatives.

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petervandijck
Me neither, same thing, current filtering seems like a better way than some
fuzzy automated labeling thing.

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petervandijck
But what I would use (might pay for) is a service that makes my attachments
easily findable. An attachment browser, basically. The UI would have to be
within Gmail, no external page. Don't put the emails central, put the
attachments central. Order by date received. Group by received from same
people/same filename. Optional grouping by type (ie: All | Images | Office
docs | ...) Add a left-hand link "Attachments".

Something like this:
[http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/05/14/4728/can-
so...](http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/05/14/4728/can-someone-make-
a-gmail-attachment-browser)

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jasonkester
Beware of building a business around an obvious missing feature to an existing
product. Especially if said product has an active team that's constantly
churning out new features, and even goes as far as to have a "labs" section.

So yeah, if you did this for Outlook instead, you might have a viable
business. For Gmail, you run a very real risk that your feature may simply
appear for free inside of Gmail itself one day, leaving you out in the cold.

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henning
I love the first comment on the post. OP: _brief explanation of idea_ First
comment: _skepticism indicating complete lack of comprehension of post_

That's how it always seems to go with these things.

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dminor
Google's search is powerful enough and fast enough that I find I really don't
need to do much labeling.

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notauser
This idea has a larger than usual chance of being crushed by competition.

Normally I wouldn't be bothered about the risk of Google/Microsoft stepping
into my market. (In fact, Microsoft are already in my market.)

But in this case:

\- They have access to more data than you. A lot more.

\- The product is bang in the middle of their core competence. They love
automated data analysis. One of their engineers would probably hack up a
competitor at the weekend for fun.

\- They already have a low-friction way of trying out ideas with Gmail (labs)
which would help counter the usual large-but-slow competitor disadvantage.

I've been considering building things on top of Gmail, but because of the
above I have decided that if I do it'll be limited to products that Google
doesn't seem to like. (And/or hobby projects for my own amusement.)

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lukev
Bayesian filtering is based on word frequency, or in sophisticated forms,
Markov analysis.

I'm not confident it could reliably discriminate between useful categories.
It'd be more likely to pick up on individuals' different vocabularies than
useful categories such as client companies, contracts or projects.

To be useful, It'd have to have > 95% accuracy (post training). I'm just not
sure a Bayesian model could do that reliably.

Unless, of course, it heavily weighted features such as "sender domain", but
by that point you might as well be using explicit filters.

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pixelbath
No, I already use automated labeling based on sender, and the amount of mail
that doesn't fall under these filters is generally 1) small in volume, and 2)
spam.

This sounds like a whole lot of work for something that already works well
enough. In my experience, Bayesian filtering works well, until it doesn't. I
then find myself frustrated because the filter is essentially a black box to
me. I could keep trying to train it, but I already have two children and three
pets. My patience for teaching things to a computer is usually nonexistent.

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paul9290
How is this different creating labels and filtering your emails into various
labels you created?

That is what I have set up. If it pertains to bill, money or bank stuff the
sender i.e. support@bankofamerica.com goes into bank & money label. That is
just an example as I have 15 or more labels where email goes accordingly.

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fragmede
OTOH, target audience (gmail users) isn't paying for email in the first
place....

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mrtom
Have you seen OtherInbox?

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jimfl
I would pay for it if it also tagged feed items in Google Reader as well.

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jgrahamc
That's entirely possible. What sort of tags do you use? Is it just
'interesting/boring' or do you have a more complex set of tags?

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jimfl
I am thinking more of auto categorization. "programming languages,"
"art/design", "lulz," "gaming," etc. But certainly with "interesting to me" as
a component of each category.

