
Dan Ariely Tries to Fix Email (2017) - rfreytag
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economist-email-less-painful/518934/?single_page=true
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prlambert
(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-a...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/2018/06/15/gmail-
ai-filter-email.amp)

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

~~~
mehrdadn
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!

~~~
prlambert
Thanks for all the feedback! I can address of few of these.

1\. Threads should be sorted by date of most recent email, regardless of
importance. This sounds like a real bug and I'll dig into it.

2\. Yes, great feedback. You could archive it, does that work?

3\. What's the use case? Why do you want to keep spam? You could forward it to
yourself and it should work (a bit hacky, i admit)

The last 3 are all not going to happen for a number of hard reasons,
unfortunately.

~~~
mehrdadn
Thanks for the reply!

1\. Thanks! Let me know if you need additional info or can't repro, the last
time this happened to me was a while ago (doesn't happen often since it
requires subsequent emails to be far apart in time and categorized with
different importance). EDIT: I just repro'd it again. The conversation
ordering under the Important section is definitely based on the date of the
last Important message rather than the date of the last message, so the
conversation will fall out of the screen if the last important message in that
conversation was a long time ago.

2\. I use archiving for emails that I want records of, but that I don't want
cluttering my inbox or appearing on my screen at all, unfortunately (like
notifications about some activity on other sites). It's not the same thing as,
say, a personal email or something from a mailing list that was unimportant
but that should still get a little bit of eyeball time at some point.

3\. There are a few use cases... sometimes I want to investigate why I got
some spam after the 1-month period when it's deleted, meaning I want the
message headers etc. to be there. Other times I want a filter that
automatically keeps everything matching it because I might not be able to
guarantee that I'll look into the spam folder every month, and I cannot risk
losing some emails that way. (How do I respond when someone asks if I got
their email and I don't have a copy to check?) I honestly think there's no
compelling reason why whether or not an email is spam _has_ to be tied to its
lifetime.

For undoing, any chance you could address why "View Message" couldn't just
send the email right then? It's impossible to undo afterward, so delaying
after it's clicked seems entirely counterproductive, right?

------
xte
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
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
> 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'.

~~~
cmiles74
I wish it was compulsory. The default in most mailers (specifically GMail) to
quote the entire body in the reply is, in my opinion, terrible.

------
CalRobert
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
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
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!

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> 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
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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
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
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.

------
User23
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.

------
qnsi
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
Could you be more specific? Which features would you like to see?

~~~
c_r_w
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
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
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
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
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?

