It's evidently not 'expected' behaviour from the point of view of the user. Just because you happen to put an email address in the title of a calendar event doesn't imply that I expect the software to go and send messages on my behalf.
A good UI would make it explicitly clear by highlighting the email address and/or by auto adding an explicit entry to the guest list.
At present there's no way to predict the behavior until after the fact. Something with that much consequence (sending an email to an unintended recipient) should never be done silently. By all means take the initiative with autofill etc, but the user should have the final say.
If the supposed design revolution within Google (http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign) isn't just for show, the Calendar team (assuming there even is an ongoing team) clearly hasn't been touched by it and that ought to be corrected.
When the user gets unexpected behaviour doing something that many believe to be reasonable, telling them they're doing it wrong is really bad user interaction.
You can't change the behaviour of users, but you can make your software easier to use and more predictable in its behaviour.
You know what, reading all your desperate posts is very disturbing. Even Google Now knows to ask before auto-doing shit, but you sit here with some stupid surgeon-like "I can do no wrong" attitude.
Generally, I thought Google hired smarter people than you seem to be, so possibly you're some sort of false-flag bullshit.
It's mine, I just signed up to join the discussion, but evidently new users get rate-limited to only a few comments, so I've incremented the username by 1 to indicate it's still me.
The rate limiting exists for a reason. It is a bit arrogant of you to assume that your comments are worty of evadin site controls.
And is it actual rate limiting? Try clicking the [link] url, whic should give you a reply text box.
Disclosing company affiliations is polite.
Not making comments in public fora, but letting company spokespeople do it, is a practice I dislike but which I understand having seen the mess you've made with your comments.
The violet blue article is lousy. If there are errors it should be easy enough to find corrections. Take the time to do it properly - find the sources, pull out relevant quotes, build the post. Put that as a blog post and get hits, or put it as an answer in the thread and get upvotes.
As a user, I would never have guessed that Calendar would do this. It frightens me in much the same ways that Buzz did. (And Buzz did leak some data that I considered very private.)
I would guess rabid fan, or maybe Google employee off the meter, who's about to get in trouble. Google's HN gardening is rather more sophisticated than this, but it does leave signals.
No it didn't, it might have been created when you joined something that required it and there was a check mark somewhere, it gets populated by stuff that you added when you started Google account like date of birth etc, but you get presented with that as well.
I'm the kind of person that explores all menu options and such in software to make sure it doesn't run/install anything I don't want. When signing up for services online, I go through all the settings. I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Maybe it was "designed" to give me an option, but I never had an option. Gmail isn't bug-free either. Over the years I've run into a few bugs. Occasionally the link for the inbox shows I have unread mail, but there is none. I'm able to fix it by doing a search for unread mail, and the link changes showing that I don't have any unread mail.
> I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Yeesh. It's stuff like this that makes me glad I run my own mail/CalDAV/CardDAV server, and am thus free to use throwaway accounts for all of my interaction with Google.
I wonder if there'd be any interest in an old-fashioned HOWTO that starts with a freshly imaged VPS and goes through the whole setup process. It's been a few years since I set everything up, but I've been planning to redo it on a fresh box anyway, and writing the HOWTO wouldn't add much effort.
I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.
You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Chamber, it's an excellently well-written document on setting up your own mail-serving VPS using postfix and dovecot; the filesystem-level encryption stuff is trivially severable, and constitutes about 80% of what I'd have written (but not as well) had I not found this first. The other 20% would be setting up Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV service, but that's pretty straightforward and well described in the Baïkal Github repo.
(Minor quibbles about the HOWTO: I'm not sure Solr is really necessary; Dovecot seems to give me full-text search for free via IMAP. Also, I tried Z-push and it worked, but didn't support message flags, which I require, and I got tired of push pretty fast anyway. It works, and might've added message flags in the years since I tried it, but it's by no means required. Still, an excellent document, which I unreservedly recommend.)
Actually, when I created a disposable gmail account a couple of years ago, it came with google plus already active. I deleted that part, of course, but I never signed up for it.
I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.
That is expected behaviour, email address in reminders applies coordination. It's basically parsing your command correctly 'email this address'.
Second, the zdnet post you link to towards the end is full of inaccuracies:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107554