I'm pretty unhappy with the way inbox is shutting down. Relatively short notice. Lack of key features brought over to gmail. General unhappiness with the gmail client. And now the app is "bricked"...
I'm pretty unhappy with the way inbox is shutting down. Relatively short notice. Lack of key features brought over to gmail. General unhappiness with the gmail client. And now the app is "bricked" basically. I would have loved more time with the app simply not getting updates until I could find something better or gmail could be brought up to speed.
It also brings to light a really good point about open source. While google is a great friend to many open source things, their products are not open source - so no one can fork inbox or google reader or any of the other beloved-but-abandoned products and keep them alive. I hope a good open source product comes along that replicates the "zero-inbox" workflow - but its quite a tall order. Email is not an easy problem, especially with so many various backend providers. And thats without going into calendars or many of the other convenient features that we get from google and icloud.
If anyone has some alternative email client options, I'd love to hear them. Having to select "All Inboxes" every other time I open gmail is absurd...I can't be the only person with more than one email account that wants a combined inbox...
I think what bugs me the most about inbox, is that they presumably shut it down because the user base was fairly low, but they really did not do a good job promoting it. Original launch was opt-in...
I think what bugs me the most about inbox, is that they presumably shut it down because the user base was fairly low, but they really did not do a good job promoting it. Original launch was opt-in or beta only, and practically no one I ever talked to knew what the hell it was even years after I started using it and it was open to the public.
If you logged into gmail, there was nothing to point you towards inbox. There was no ad campaign, no awareness through google suite of its existence. Yes of course it failed because everyone was already on gmail and you didn't tell them of this products existence!
Inbox still works on iOS and with older APKs apparently, although I'm sure Google is hard at work in that department. Inbox also still works if you haven't refreshed your browser tab, though I'm...
Inbox still works on iOS and with older APKs apparently, although I'm sure Google is hard at work in that department. Inbox also still works if you haven't refreshed your browser tab, though I'm sure it's only a matter of time until Windows Update takes Inbox away from me for good or Google shuts down the servers.
I have very little trust in the longevity of Google products at this point, and I worry about being able to recommend Google products to others anymore. I showed my cousins and my mom Google Photos, and they were blown away - Google lets you search for people and images, and it prunes photos from your device automatically. 3 of them canceled their iCloud subscriptions and one of them even upgraded her Google Drive so she could store all her full-res photos, and I didn't even try to push them to use it. No longer did they have to get a bigger iPhone just for their photo library, nor did they have to decide what photos to export to another device and delete when their phone ran out of space. What happens if Google decides to close down Photos? There are no good auto-pruning alternatives that have powerful search capabilities.
Items in the GSuite portfolio have a more predictable lifespan, but it's still at the mercy of Google, and anything not in the GSuite lineup can be killed at will.
Google is smart to experiment to avoid becoming a beast like Microsoft in the Balmer-era, but their constant killing off of existing products arguably makes them worse. If a product will likely disappear in a few years, why bother adpoting it? The early adopters won't recommend it to others, so it probably won't gain the critical mass needed to keep it from being killed, and the cycle continues. If they killed off unsuccessful products within a year, that would be fine, but they keep them alive so long you assume they're actually going to stick with them until they put up a blog post that they're shutting it down.
I remember when Inbox came out. I posted in multiple reddit threads for an invite, and I was in the same day. I loved it. Google was still seemed like the company when it came to tech, now they feel more like a corporate embodiment of ADHD.
People adopt it because it's free and they are a little lazy. What alternatives do they have if they don't want to spend money or do the work themselves? It's costly to have that kind of service...
If a product will likely disappear in a few years, why bother adpoting it?
People adopt it because it's free and they are a little lazy.
What alternatives do they have if they don't want to spend money or do the work themselves? It's costly to have that kind of service with storage enough for high res pictures.
If google is giving it for "free" (not exactly free, but it's not costing money for the user), they just pull the plug if it isn't worth anymore.
They need to gain something. That something is data. Google photos probably wasn't giving them anything they aren't already getting in other ways without the huge costs.
I use... Well I have to include this little notice first that, while this setup works really great for me, it is possibly fairly obscure for someone used to monolithic, comprehensive, and...
I use...
Well I have to include this little notice first that, while this setup works really great for me, it is possibly fairly obscure for someone used to monolithic, comprehensive, and quick-setup email solutions. That said...
I use an email workflow that always leaves me with little or no unread email in my mailbox. It is an abstract workflow that can possibly be adapted to other apps, but I use Emacs' Rmail & have recently "ported" it to Mutt too, just to have a backup way in case I can't use Emacs (in case it is building, or I broke my setup somehow).
In essence it involves three mailboxes. I use mboxes because IMO they are easier to use, solutions like Maildir are an overkill for a personal setup. But a Maildir could be used too. The mboxes are "inbox", "current" and "archive". When I fetch mail (manually, when I want to read mail), it comes into inbox. I use msmtp & provmail to fetch from multiple POP3 accounts (I don't keep mail on the server), and all go there. When I open my reader, Rmail or Mutt, it moves mail from inbox to current, and displays the current mbox. As I read each message, I either keep it in current if I am not done with it, or delete it if I won't need it later (newsletters, anouncements, &c, stuff not specifically sent to me only), or file it to archive (or spam, where I keep spam for later inspection if necessary) and delete from current.
I also have use K-9 Mail on Android to check mail on the go, but I actually read and always write mail on my computer.
The great thing with Rmail is that, because it is in Emacs, I can create functions and keybindings to minimise chores for frequent actions. E.g. I hit one key to open the html part of current message in my browser and also file the the messsge to archive, deleting it from current.
I can also link to messages from org mode documents which is great. I use mairix to search across many mboxes.
I also subscribe to a minim number of newsletters, and prefer RSS instead.
All this is fairly easy to configure, and quite efficient in my experience. I haven't used Gmail in a long while, and I don't miss it at all. Here is my setup (on mobile so can't link individual files, see emacs.d/ and dotfiles/ folders for configs of Rmail, Mutt, mpop, msmtp, procmail & mairix): https://gitlab.com/cadadr/configuration
I achieve the same outcome with only one mailbox. I use sub-folders instead. For my work emails, I create sub-folders for each task I have to do during the day ("pay these", "receive those",...
I use an email workflow that always leaves me with little or no unread email in my mailbox.
In essence it involves three mailboxes.
I achieve the same outcome with only one mailbox. I use sub-folders instead.
For my work emails, I create sub-folders for each task I have to do during the day ("pay these", "receive those", "answer them", and so on). At the start of each day, I go through the inbox and move every email to one of the task sub-folders until the inbox is empty. Then, as I work throughout the day, I go to each one of the tasks sub-folders in turn and address the emails in that task sub-folder. So, for one hour I'll work on "pay these", and for another hour I'll work on "answer them", and so on. Every now and then, I check the inbox for new emails and move them to the task sub-folders to be dealt with when I'm working on that task.
For my personal emails, I have lots of archival sub-folders. The inbox has only current emails I need to refer to now or in the short-term. When I've read an email, it either gets deleted or stored in one of the archival sub-folders. Or, if I have to do something about it, I leave it in my inbox until such time I have done something about it - at which time it either gets deleted or stored in one of the archival sub-folders.
My work inbox is empty for most of the day, and my personal inbox usually has about 10 emails in it (never more than 20).
I've never understood how people cope with hundreds of emails in their inboxes. That's just unnecessary clutter to me.
I have a gmail account that stays around since time immemorial. I want to delete it but I use it for Android. It used to be my primary mail tho. It is bombarded with spam. I had made a few...
I have a gmail account that stays around since time immemorial. I want to delete it but I use it for Android. It used to be my primary mail tho.
It is bombarded with spam. I had made a few accounts with it. All those accounts send multiple emails a day unless you opt-out of the cruft. Every account sends you an email for each notification. People with thousands of mail in their inboxes, they are subscribed to many newsletters, get a lot of spam from stuff they have accounts on (social media, shopping, etc.), and maybe they follow dev mailing lists (NNTP is better for that but Gmane is not really working these days).
When I got my email on my own domain a few years ago, I was careful enough to not stick it to every e-mail box that exists out there. Thus, I don't really get any spam. I feel like it not being Gmail has some effect too, but I'm not sure.
Your setup and mine is actually very similar, but your folders map to my mboxes (which is short for mailbox, but it is just a plain text file on disk with messages in it), and I don't categorise (granted, I don't receive a lot of email these days). What many do is they never archive or discard messages, but just keep them in their inboxes, marked as read.
If I was the sort of person who signed up for lots of newsletters, or lots of websites that produce spam, I would create a separate email address to receive all that cruft - separate from my...
If I was the sort of person who signed up for lots of newsletters, or lots of websites that produce spam, I would create a separate email address to receive all that cruft - separate from my important correspondence. I very nearly did this a couple of weeks ago, when I was being asked to sign up to a website whose privacy policy wasn't so much about how they would keep your data private, but who they would give your data to and why (luckily I ended up not having to sign up).
Another useful trick is to know that Gmail (and some others, but it's not standard) do two things with the local part (stuff before the @): ignore periods and drop everything after a +. For...
Another useful trick is to know that Gmail (and some others, but it's not standard) do two things with the local part (stuff before the @): ignore periods and drop everything after a +. For example, these are all equivalent in google's eyes:
This means that you can sign up for spammy services with something like foobar+spammy@gmail.com and then set up whatever filters you might want (e.g. flag as spam, add a special tag, whatever). If things get bad, you can blackhole it with a filter to immediately delete.
You can even use unique +stuff per website. This allows you to monitor where your email may be "leaking" from. If you get an email from MarketingCo to foobar+tildes@gmail.com, you can assume that Tildes sold or otherwise provided it to MarketingCo.
I've seen this technique mentioned many times before, but does it work in practice? If we know about it, certainly companies do as well and can easily remove any +text suffixes to your email...
I've seen this technique mentioned many times before, but does it work in practice?
If we know about it, certainly companies do as well and can easily remove any +text suffixes to your email address before selling it/after buying it.
I don't use Gmail so I can't try it myself, but it seems easily circumventable?
It'd be easy enough to infer this on @gmail.com addresses (if the company cared enough to filter them, which experience suggests the vast majority do not), but since G Suite runs a huge number of...
It'd be easy enough to infer this on @gmail.com addresses (if the company cared enough to filter them, which experience suggests the vast majority do not), but since G Suite runs a huge number of university/company/organisation domains, there's no plausible way of knowing whether those addresses are using this technique or whether they're legitimately different addresses that happen to have a plus in them.
That's handy if you use Gmail as your primary email service. Me... I prefer to have at least the illusion of privacy with my emails, so I use a paid email service provider.
That's handy if you use Gmail as your primary email service. Me... I prefer to have at least the illusion of privacy with my emails, so I use a paid email service provider.
No, but I can see how that response might have been confusing. I was saying that I thought that the ability to tag emails with the plus symbol was a part of the RFC documents that define email....
No, but I can see how that response might have been confusing.
I was saying that I thought that the ability to tag emails with the plus symbol was a part of the RFC documents that define email. Your email provider may support it, so you should try to send yourself an email with a tag to test it.
I'm still confused. Why would I want to send myself an email with a plus symbol? (How would that even work? Where's the "+" supposed to go? And what's it for?) What's an RFC document? And... most...
I'm still confused. Why would I want to send myself an email with a plus symbol? (How would that even work? Where's the "+" supposed to go? And what's it for?) What's an RFC document?
And... most importantly... what does this have to do with me refusing to use Gmail as my primary email service because I prefer to use an email service that won't snoop into all my personal correspondence?
An RFC is basically a document describing a technology standard, like what valid email addresses are and how to handle them. They're saying that the handling of "+whatever" may be part of such a...
An RFC is basically a document describing a technology standard, like what valid email addresses are and how to handle them. They're saying that the handling of "+whatever" may be part of such a standard instead of just a feature of Gmail.
They're saying that if your address is "algernon_asimov@website.com", try sending a message to "algernon_asimov+whatever@website.com" to see if it still gets delivered. If it does, it means your email provider handles the "+whatever" tag like Gmail does.
Earlier up you implied that you wished you could take advantage of that feature outside of Gmail service. He was offering you a suggestion to make that possible.
Earlier up you implied that you wished you could take advantage of that feature outside of Gmail service. He was offering you a suggestion to make that possible.
What? No, I didn't. I never said I wanted to use this "+whatever" feature (I barely understand it!). I don't have a use or need for it. When did I say I wanted to use it? How did these wires get...
you implied that you wished you could take advantage of that feature outside of Gmail service.
What? No, I didn't. I never said I wanted to use this "+whatever" feature (I barely understand it!). I don't have a use or need for it. When did I say I wanted to use it?
How did these wires get so badly crossed?
(Sorry, I had just deleted and re-posted the comment you replied to.)
Thank you for that explanation, but... WHY? Why someone is telling me to send myself an email with a "+whatever" tag to prove that it works. What's the point? Why does it matter? Why do I care?...
it means your email provider handles the "+whatever" tag like Gmail does.
Thank you for that explanation, but...
WHY?
Why someone is telling me to send myself an email with a "+whatever" tag to prove that it works. What's the point? Why does it matter? Why do I care? And how is this connected to me not using Gmail as my primary email provider because I prefer privacy?
I feel like I'm missing a HUGE piece of this puzzle.
I'm not trying to be difficult or smart-arse or anything like that. I honestly feel like I've stepped through the looking-glass into Wonderland. This whole conversation just isn't making sense to me at all.
There's been a lot of new info flying around, so I'm going to try and simplify the discussion. You mentioned that you use throwaway account(s) when signing up for potentially spammy sites/services...
Exemplary
There's been a lot of new info flying around, so I'm going to try and simplify the discussion.
You mentioned that you use throwaway account(s) when signing up for potentially spammy sites/services in order to easily separate that from the good email.
I suggested that, at least with Gmail, you can use the "+whatever" tag when signing up for those sites so you can do spam filtering easily without needing additional accounts.
You said that was a handy feature, but you don't use Gmail, so couldn't use it.
Akir suggested trying the "+whatever" tag with your email provider by sending a message to yourself with it to see if you actually could use that feature you thought would be handy without needing Gmail.
Well, yes. You've got me on a technicality there: I did literally use the word "handy" to describe that feature. And the rest of my comment does strongly imply I can't use the feature. And, if I...
You said that was a handy feature
Well, yes. You've got me on a technicality there: I did literally use the word "handy" to describe that feature. And the rest of my comment does strongly imply I can't use the feature. And, if I say I can't use a feature, I suppose it's easy to for people to assume that I would use the feature if only I could.
Except that I wouldn't.
I didn't actually say I wanted to use this feature - because I don't want to use it. Hence my confusion: I never intended to use it, so I didn't ask how to use it... and therefore didn't understand these replies because they were answering a question I hadn't asked.
Maybe I should have written that comment differently:
That's handy if you use Gmail as your primary email service and want to write a whole lot of filters to handle your emails. Me... I prefer to have at least the illusion of privacy with my emails, so I use a paid email service provider. Also, I like to keep things simple and obvious, so I wouldn't set up a whole suite of filters even if this tagging feature worked for other email services than Gmail. I would prefer to just set up a single separate email for spammy sign-ups regardless. But it does seem like a handy feature for other people.[additions in bold]
I apologise for misleading everyone: you, @Akir, @wes, @whom. Thank you all for your help (even if it was unexpected), and I'm sorry for wasting all of your time.
Back up to here is where the use of that was mentioned. You thought it was handy there, and people started talking about how it might be possible on your provider anyway rather than just on gmail.
Back up to here is where the use of that was mentioned. You thought it was handy there, and people started talking about how it might be possible on your provider anyway rather than just on gmail.
Thanks! FWIW, you can easily skip all the external programs and use Emacs' SMTP and POP3 / IMAP tools (you'd still need mairix for search tho, but it is alread integrated into Emacs, mairix.el is...
Thanks! FWIW, you can easily skip all the external programs and use Emacs' SMTP and POP3 / IMAP tools (you'd still need mairix for search tho, but it is alread integrated into Emacs, mairix.el is in Emacs proper). I used to use Emacs SMTP, but it is really hard to set it up with multiple accounts, and I like having access to SMTP & POP3 from scripts too (which can probably be done with emacsclient too, but I haven't actually tried).
The rule seems to be that products that are tied closely to Google's server infrastructure are not open-sourced. Google Reader's crawler was tied directly to their own search crawler. While they...
While google is a great friend to many open source things, their products are not open source - so no one can fork inbox or google reader or any of the other beloved-but-abandoned products and keep them alive.
The rule seems to be that products that are tied closely to Google's server infrastructure are not open-sourced. Google Reader's crawler was tied directly to their own search crawler. While they could have open-sourced part of the project, I'm not sure how useful it might have been on its own. I got the sense it was a pretty rickety foundation anyway, and they had few engineers on the project near the end.
Inbox is a more modern product, but still tied closely to Google services. I'm not too surprised it hasn't been open-sourced either. I'd wager some of the underlying libraries have been though.
No, thats not the killer feature. Its just a basic thing that gmail does. It opens to only the primary email account by default. Theres afaik no way to change it to prefer defaulting to "all...
No, thats not the killer feature. Its just a basic thing that gmail does. It opens to only the primary email account by default. Theres afaik no way to change it to prefer defaulting to "all inboxes".
Inbox had two killer features that seem to be lacking in gmail (in addition to just being a much nicer, cleaner, and well-though out UI):
Bundling. Going on a trip? Inbox would bundle your flight, rental car, hotel, etc all in the same place. Was very convenient for those that used it.
In-line reminders. Not only could you "snooze" an email for later - but you could also create reminders and snooze them for later and they would be in-line with the rest of your emails. It was great to wake up in the morning, remember you needed to buy eggs, and set a reminder for just before you leave work.
For a not very busy email account removing all tabs of categories (like "Promotions") works. All incoming emails fall into the single inbox, you get a notification, if you only acknowledge an...
Having to select "All Inboxes"
For a not very busy email account removing all tabs of categories (like "Promotions") works. All incoming emails fall into the single inbox, you get a notification, if you only acknowledge an email you just hit Archive, otherwise it stays in inbox for a while. This way the inbox contains only a few important emails, and the rest are archived and still searchable if needed. Very simple setup.
I think they're talking about multiple separate gmail account inboxes, not the category inbox/tabs. If I recall correctly, when signed into multiple accounts in the Gmail app, you can switch...
I think they're talking about multiple separate gmail account inboxes, not the category inbox/tabs. If I recall correctly, when signed into multiple accounts in the Gmail app, you can switch between account inboxes or go to an "All Inboxes" for a single unified message listing.
I agree. Reading this article made me so glad that I'm a late adopter! It also made me glad that I'm a bit of a Luddite. I don't adopt new technologies just for the sake of it. I have to see a...
I've been promoting a "wait and see" approach for most new Google products since at least 2016.
I agree. Reading this article made me so glad that I'm a late adopter!
It also made me glad that I'm a bit of a Luddite. I don't adopt new technologies just for the sake of it. I have to see a need for the new product/service. And, for most of these new technologies, I simply never had a need for them.
One thing that could placate Google users is for the company to just tell us what is going on. Google already makes support promises for some of its products. [...] I want communication from Google that says which products will be around for a long time and which are a low priority at the company. Would it be so hard to publicly commit to running Stadia for five years no matter what? For its more successful products, Google could commit to 10 years of running a service and update the dashboard from time to time with later dates.
This is a bit idealistic. I'm pretty sure that, if such a roadmap had been in place when Google+ was launched, it would have said Google+ was going to be a permanent application - because that was the intention at the time. They couldn't predict back then that their successors were going to change their minds some years down the track. And, even if Google does promise minimum lifespans for new products... they wouldn't be the first company in history to break a promise.
Having a roadmap doesn't help when the driver changes their mind about the destination halfway.
I'm pretty unhappy with the way inbox is shutting down. Relatively short notice. Lack of key features brought over to gmail. General unhappiness with the gmail client. And now the app is "bricked" basically. I would have loved more time with the app simply not getting updates until I could find something better or gmail could be brought up to speed.
It also brings to light a really good point about open source. While google is a great friend to many open source things, their products are not open source - so no one can fork inbox or google reader or any of the other beloved-but-abandoned products and keep them alive. I hope a good open source product comes along that replicates the "zero-inbox" workflow - but its quite a tall order. Email is not an easy problem, especially with so many various backend providers. And thats without going into calendars or many of the other convenient features that we get from google and icloud.
If anyone has some alternative email client options, I'd love to hear them. Having to select "All Inboxes" every other time I open gmail is absurd...I can't be the only person with more than one email account that wants a combined inbox...
I think what bugs me the most about inbox, is that they presumably shut it down because the user base was fairly low, but they really did not do a good job promoting it. Original launch was opt-in or beta only, and practically no one I ever talked to knew what the hell it was even years after I started using it and it was open to the public.
If you logged into gmail, there was nothing to point you towards inbox. There was no ad campaign, no awareness through google suite of its existence. Yes of course it failed because everyone was already on gmail and you didn't tell them of this products existence!
Inbox still works on iOS and with older APKs apparently, although I'm sure Google is hard at work in that department. Inbox also still works if you haven't refreshed your browser tab, though I'm sure it's only a matter of time until Windows Update takes Inbox away from me for good or Google shuts down the servers.
I have very little trust in the longevity of Google products at this point, and I worry about being able to recommend Google products to others anymore. I showed my cousins and my mom Google Photos, and they were blown away - Google lets you search for people and images, and it prunes photos from your device automatically. 3 of them canceled their iCloud subscriptions and one of them even upgraded her Google Drive so she could store all her full-res photos, and I didn't even try to push them to use it. No longer did they have to get a bigger iPhone just for their photo library, nor did they have to decide what photos to export to another device and delete when their phone ran out of space. What happens if Google decides to close down Photos? There are no good auto-pruning alternatives that have powerful search capabilities.
Items in the GSuite portfolio have a more predictable lifespan, but it's still at the mercy of Google, and anything not in the GSuite lineup can be killed at will.
Google is smart to experiment to avoid becoming a beast like Microsoft in the Balmer-era, but their constant killing off of existing products arguably makes them worse. If a product will likely disappear in a few years, why bother adpoting it? The early adopters won't recommend it to others, so it probably won't gain the critical mass needed to keep it from being killed, and the cycle continues. If they killed off unsuccessful products within a year, that would be fine, but they keep them alive so long you assume they're actually going to stick with them until they put up a blog post that they're shutting it down.
I remember when Inbox came out. I posted in multiple reddit threads for an invite, and I was in the same day. I loved it. Google was still seemed like the company when it came to tech, now they feel more like a corporate embodiment of ADHD.
People adopt it because it's free and they are a little lazy.
What alternatives do they have if they don't want to spend money or do the work themselves? It's costly to have that kind of service with storage enough for high res pictures.
If google is giving it for "free" (not exactly free, but it's not costing money for the user), they just pull the plug if it isn't worth anymore.
They need to gain something. That something is data. Google photos probably wasn't giving them anything they aren't already getting in other ways without the huge costs.
I use...
Well I have to include this little notice first that, while this setup works really great for me, it is possibly fairly obscure for someone used to monolithic, comprehensive, and quick-setup email solutions. That said...
I use an email workflow that always leaves me with little or no unread email in my mailbox. It is an abstract workflow that can possibly be adapted to other apps, but I use Emacs' Rmail & have recently "ported" it to Mutt too, just to have a backup way in case I can't use Emacs (in case it is building, or I broke my setup somehow).
In essence it involves three mailboxes. I use mboxes because IMO they are easier to use, solutions like Maildir are an overkill for a personal setup. But a Maildir could be used too. The mboxes are "inbox", "current" and "archive". When I fetch mail (manually, when I want to read mail), it comes into inbox. I use msmtp & provmail to fetch from multiple POP3 accounts (I don't keep mail on the server), and all go there. When I open my reader, Rmail or Mutt, it moves mail from inbox to current, and displays the current mbox. As I read each message, I either keep it in current if I am not done with it, or delete it if I won't need it later (newsletters, anouncements, &c, stuff not specifically sent to me only), or file it to archive (or spam, where I keep spam for later inspection if necessary) and delete from current.
I also have use K-9 Mail on Android to check mail on the go, but I actually read and always write mail on my computer.
The great thing with Rmail is that, because it is in Emacs, I can create functions and keybindings to minimise chores for frequent actions. E.g. I hit one key to open the html part of current message in my browser and also file the the messsge to archive, deleting it from current.
I can also link to messages from org mode documents which is great. I use mairix to search across many mboxes.
I also subscribe to a minim number of newsletters, and prefer RSS instead.
All this is fairly easy to configure, and quite efficient in my experience. I haven't used Gmail in a long while, and I don't miss it at all. Here is my setup (on mobile so can't link individual files, see emacs.d/ and dotfiles/ folders for configs of Rmail, Mutt, mpop, msmtp, procmail & mairix): https://gitlab.com/cadadr/configuration
I achieve the same outcome with only one mailbox. I use sub-folders instead.
For my work emails, I create sub-folders for each task I have to do during the day ("pay these", "receive those", "answer them", and so on). At the start of each day, I go through the inbox and move every email to one of the task sub-folders until the inbox is empty. Then, as I work throughout the day, I go to each one of the tasks sub-folders in turn and address the emails in that task sub-folder. So, for one hour I'll work on "pay these", and for another hour I'll work on "answer them", and so on. Every now and then, I check the inbox for new emails and move them to the task sub-folders to be dealt with when I'm working on that task.
For my personal emails, I have lots of archival sub-folders. The inbox has only current emails I need to refer to now or in the short-term. When I've read an email, it either gets deleted or stored in one of the archival sub-folders. Or, if I have to do something about it, I leave it in my inbox until such time I have done something about it - at which time it either gets deleted or stored in one of the archival sub-folders.
My work inbox is empty for most of the day, and my personal inbox usually has about 10 emails in it (never more than 20).
I've never understood how people cope with hundreds of emails in their inboxes. That's just unnecessary clutter to me.
I have a gmail account that stays around since time immemorial. I want to delete it but I use it for Android. It used to be my primary mail tho.
It is bombarded with spam. I had made a few accounts with it. All those accounts send multiple emails a day unless you opt-out of the cruft. Every account sends you an email for each notification. People with thousands of mail in their inboxes, they are subscribed to many newsletters, get a lot of spam from stuff they have accounts on (social media, shopping, etc.), and maybe they follow dev mailing lists (NNTP is better for that but Gmane is not really working these days).
When I got my email on my own domain a few years ago, I was careful enough to not stick it to every e-mail box that exists out there. Thus, I don't really get any spam. I feel like it not being Gmail has some effect too, but I'm not sure.
Your setup and mine is actually very similar, but your folders map to my mboxes (which is short for mailbox, but it is just a plain text file on disk with messages in it), and I don't categorise (granted, I don't receive a lot of email these days). What many do is they never archive or discard messages, but just keep them in their inboxes, marked as read.
If I was the sort of person who signed up for lots of newsletters, or lots of websites that produce spam, I would create a separate email address to receive all that cruft - separate from my important correspondence. I very nearly did this a couple of weeks ago, when I was being asked to sign up to a website whose privacy policy wasn't so much about how they would keep your data private, but who they would give your data to and why (luckily I ended up not having to sign up).
Another useful trick is to know that Gmail (and some others, but it's not standard) do two things with the local part (stuff before the
@): ignore periods and drop everything after a+. For example, these are all equivalent in google's eyes:This means that you can sign up for spammy services with something like
foobar+spammy@gmail.comand then set up whatever filters you might want (e.g. flag as spam, add a special tag, whatever). If things get bad, you can blackhole it with a filter to immediately delete.You can even use unique
+stuffper website. This allows you to monitor where your email may be "leaking" from. If you get an email from MarketingCo tofoobar+tildes@gmail.com, you can assume that Tildes sold or otherwise provided it to MarketingCo.I've seen this technique mentioned many times before, but does it work in practice?
If we know about it, certainly companies do as well and can easily remove any
+textsuffixes to your email address before selling it/after buying it.I don't use Gmail so I can't try it myself, but it seems easily circumventable?
It'd be easy enough to infer this on @gmail.com addresses (if the company cared enough to filter them, which experience suggests the vast majority do not), but since G Suite runs a huge number of university/company/organisation domains, there's no plausible way of knowing whether those addresses are using this technique or whether they're legitimately different addresses that happen to have a plus in them.
Some sites don't even allow the + character in email addresses.
That's handy if you use Gmail as your primary email service. Me... I prefer to have at least the illusion of privacy with my emails, so I use a paid email service provider.
IIRC this is actually a part of the RFC. Try sending yourself an email with a tag and see if it works.
What? Did you reply to the right person?
No, but I can see how that response might have been confusing.
I was saying that I thought that the ability to tag emails with the plus symbol was a part of the RFC documents that define email. Your email provider may support it, so you should try to send yourself an email with a tag to test it.
I'm still confused. Why would I want to send myself an email with a plus symbol? (How would that even work? Where's the "+" supposed to go? And what's it for?) What's an RFC document?
And... most importantly... what does this have to do with me refusing to use Gmail as my primary email service because I prefer to use an email service that won't snoop into all my personal correspondence?
An RFC is basically a document describing a technology standard, like what valid email addresses are and how to handle them. They're saying that the handling of "+whatever" may be part of such a standard instead of just a feature of Gmail.
They're saying that if your address is "algernon_asimov@website.com", try sending a message to "algernon_asimov+whatever@website.com" to see if it still gets delivered. If it does, it means your email provider handles the "+whatever" tag like Gmail does.
Earlier up you implied that you wished you could take advantage of that feature outside of Gmail service. He was offering you a suggestion to make that possible.
What? No, I didn't. I never said I wanted to use this "+whatever" feature (I barely understand it!). I don't have a use or need for it. When did I say I wanted to use it?
How did these wires get so badly crossed?
(Sorry, I had just deleted and re-posted the comment you replied to.)
Thank you for that explanation, but...
WHY?
Why someone is telling me to send myself an email with a "+whatever" tag to prove that it works. What's the point? Why does it matter? Why do I care? And how is this connected to me not using Gmail as my primary email provider because I prefer privacy?
I feel like I'm missing a HUGE piece of this puzzle.
I'm not trying to be difficult or smart-arse or anything like that. I honestly feel like I've stepped through the looking-glass into Wonderland. This whole conversation just isn't making sense to me at all.
There's been a lot of new info flying around, so I'm going to try and simplify the discussion.
Well, yes. You've got me on a technicality there: I did literally use the word "handy" to describe that feature. And the rest of my comment does strongly imply I can't use the feature. And, if I say I can't use a feature, I suppose it's easy to for people to assume that I would use the feature if only I could.
Except that I wouldn't.
I didn't actually say I wanted to use this feature - because I don't want to use it. Hence my confusion: I never intended to use it, so I didn't ask how to use it... and therefore didn't understand these replies because they were answering a question I hadn't asked.
Maybe I should have written that comment differently:
I apologise for misleading everyone: you, @Akir, @wes, @whom. Thank you all for your help (even if it was unexpected), and I'm sorry for wasting all of your time.
Back up to here is where the use of that was mentioned. You thought it was handy there, and people started talking about how it might be possible on your provider anyway rather than just on gmail.
Unfortunately, many companies check for those now and will not allow you to sign up when you use + to tag your emails.
That is quite the setup! Definitely a bit overkill for the average user, but it does sound like you can get to the exact workflow you want.
Thanks! FWIW, you can easily skip all the external programs and use Emacs' SMTP and POP3 / IMAP tools (you'd still need mairix for search tho, but it is alread integrated into Emacs,
mairix.elis in Emacs proper). I used to use Emacs SMTP, but it is really hard to set it up with multiple accounts, and I like having access to SMTP & POP3 from scripts too (which can probably be done with emacsclient too, but I haven't actually tried).The rule seems to be that products that are tied closely to Google's server infrastructure are not open-sourced. Google Reader's crawler was tied directly to their own search crawler. While they could have open-sourced part of the project, I'm not sure how useful it might have been on its own. I got the sense it was a pretty rickety foundation anyway, and they had few engineers on the project near the end.
Inbox is a more modern product, but still tied closely to Google services. I'm not too surprised it hasn't been open-sourced either. I'd wager some of the underlying libraries have been though.
No, thats not the killer feature. Its just a basic thing that gmail does. It opens to only the primary email account by default. Theres afaik no way to change it to prefer defaulting to "all inboxes".
Inbox had two killer features that seem to be lacking in gmail (in addition to just being a much nicer, cleaner, and well-though out UI):
For a not very busy email account removing all tabs of categories (like "Promotions") works. All incoming emails fall into the single inbox, you get a notification, if you only acknowledge an email you just hit Archive, otherwise it stays in inbox for a while. This way the inbox contains only a few important emails, and the rest are archived and still searchable if needed. Very simple setup.
p.s. I never used Inbox app
I think they're talking about multiple separate gmail account inboxes, not the category inbox/tabs. If I recall correctly, when signed into multiple accounts in the Gmail app, you can switch between account inboxes or go to an "All Inboxes" for a single unified message listing.
I have those tabs removed - I'm referring to "All Inboxes" meaning both of my emails coming to the same inbox. It defaults to just my android gmail.
I agree. Reading this article made me so glad that I'm a late adopter!
It also made me glad that I'm a bit of a Luddite. I don't adopt new technologies just for the sake of it. I have to see a need for the new product/service. And, for most of these new technologies, I simply never had a need for them.
This is a bit idealistic. I'm pretty sure that, if such a roadmap had been in place when Google+ was launched, it would have said Google+ was going to be a permanent application - because that was the intention at the time. They couldn't predict back then that their successors were going to change their minds some years down the track. And, even if Google does promise minimum lifespans for new products... they wouldn't be the first company in history to break a promise.
Having a roadmap doesn't help when the driver changes their mind about the destination halfway.
I kind of suspect most of society's modern ills are a combination of managerial red tape and being too stubborn to admit it