Gmail Turns 15, Gets Smart Compose Improvements and Email Scheduling (techcrunch.com) 56
Today, to celebrate its fifteenth birthday, the Gmail team announced a couple of a new and useful Gmail features, including improvements to Smart Compose and the ability to schedule emails to be sent in the future. From a report: Smart Compose, which tries to autocomplete your emails as you type them, will now be able to adapt to the way you write the greetings in your emails. If you prefer 'Hey' over 'Hi,' then Smart Compose will learn that. If you often fret over which subject to use for your emails, then there's some relief here for you, too, because Smart Compose can now suggest a subject line based on the content of your email. With this update, Smart Compose is now also available on all Android devices.
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April fool!
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Yes, but will it ever exit Beta?
It's about TIME! (Score:2)
Tagging here because I suspect it's an April Fool story...
However, future delivery is something I've been advocating for several years. I'm betting the google mucked it up. Right now that's basically a wager until I see how it works. I know how I want it to work, but the REAL problem is that I'm time-centric and today's google is all about the money.
For example, I want to combine future delivery with the unsend feature by having an option for a default future delivery time. ALL of my email would be delayed
Rest of my Christmas list (Score:2)
Should mention the other email options that are at the top of my wish list:
(0) An effective spammer-fighting system to help put the scammers out of business. "Live and let spam" is NOT a solution. The basic principle is that only the potential victims know for sure.
(1) Reject and bounce confidential-mode email. If you don't trust me that much, I do NOT want your email.
(2) Reject no-reply email. If you don't care enough to receive my reply, then I do NOT want your email. And you don't even deserve to know it
Re: It's about TIME! (Score:2)
The way I would use 'future send' would be to mark an email to be sent to a person just before they start their work day, so that my email is one of the first emails they see when they open their mail client.
Rather than try and compose the email so that it's finished and sent when the recipient at work, I can casually write it the night before and schedule it's sending (and by extension it's arrival) to be 8:00 AM local time.
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I thought I sent you an ACK on this? I agree it's a good idea, but it works even better if it's a friend and you know more details. For example, if you know your friend usually opens the email after a cup of coffee, you can schedule your email to arrive at that time.
Another variation I want would be a default reply sending time, basically to slow down the pace of non-urgent email. It's another application of relative time in the future, but with a bigger delay than for the unsend capability.
I'd draft the re
Friends don't let friends... (Score:1)
use Gmail.
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Hotmail FTW
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Hotmail FTW
As I've said before, Outlook.com does not suck. And while Microsoft may desire to monetize your personal details, they definitely lack Google's talent at it.
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So basically, lack of evil by incompetence?
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Best you can hope for, these days.
Re: Friends don't let friends... (Score:2)
It is almost the worst system you can design. You often get poorly targeted advertisements or exceptionally targeted content that stokes outrage. Then, on top of that, the advertising system provides a mechanism for malicious content to execute on your browser.
Inbox (Score:2)
It's beyond the end of March and I'm happily using Inbox.
This whole EOL for Inbox better of been an April fools joke.
thank goodness for Thunderbird (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's crappy. It's been ignored for years. But it mostly works and I never have to put up with those oddball webmail interfaces. All my inboxes work in the same reliable way they have for years and Tbird doesn't try to think for me.
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I couldn't get it to properly sync with Yahoo and Thunderbird seemed to run a lot in the background. Maybe I should try to get it working again...
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It never kept up with the changing authentication landscape.
eM client demonstrates how to smoothly set up connectivity with the different email hosts. A free email client that was as good would be nice. Updating TBird with those features would be a great idea.
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Seconded.
One place for all my email accounts, and they all work the same (simple) way. It's the perfect tool for those of us who neither want, nor require "help" writing emails. I believe my first email client was elm...now, off my lawn!
Lol, yeah. (Score:4, Informative)
I tried smart compose for all of one email, and every single suggestion it had was laughably off. I gave it 3 paragraphs to be useful, and it's clear that it's nowhere near useful. And it's not like I was typing something complicated - I was discussing trip logistics with a family member. There was not a single suggestion that I would have remotely considered selecting. It was baffling.
I'm unclear who wants this sort of "help". It's so half-baked and shitty that I can't help but think that it's just more data collection that they hope will be useful in the future. It is 100% not ready for prime-time, unless you're writing at a 3rd grade level or below. And even then, I kind-of doubt it.
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I tried smart compose for all of one email, and every single suggestion it had was laughably off. I gave it 3 paragraphs to be useful, and it's clear that it's nowhere near useful. And it's not like I was typing something complicated - I was discussing trip logistics with a family member. There was not a single suggestion that I would have remotely considered selecting. It was baffling.
I'm unclear who wants this sort of "help". It's so half-baked and shitty that I can't help but think that it's just more data collection that they hope will be useful in the future. It is 100% not ready for prime-time, unless you're writing at a 3rd grade level or below. And even then, I kind-of doubt it.
Eh, I kind of like the auto complete for "Hi Recipientsfirstname". I'll admit it.
I mean, I know the Thunderbird/Pine way to accomplish that would be to set up by hand complex custom rules that trigger based on recipient. But this way is kinda cool too ...
I'm also amused by the autocomplete suggestions for "I'm sorry" and variants when emailing my wife, lol
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In the era of fake news these (bad) April 1st jokes just conflate the issues. :-/ Can't we just tag the bloody articles to stop wasting everyone's time?
Would prefer to have real news where there is no ambiguity then fake news and uncertainty if it real, fake, or April fools. That's just my personal preference. What's yours?
Need a better design (Score:4, Informative)
It's also a lot slower than it use to be.
It was the last straw on having a Google account.
Re: Need a better design (Score:2)
Yup. It's a good demonstration why one should not outsource UI design to Fischer Price.
That's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
... as long as we can turn it off.
Opt-in versus opt-out? (Score:2)
Not clear which of the new features you're talking about, but I read the description of the future delivery and it appears to be opt-in, so it won't get in the way. However, after checking with Gmail, the feature is not actually where it is supposed to be. I think the description sounds right, so I'm hoping that the upgrade is not fully propagated yet. It's supposed to be a pull-down option off the send button, but I can't find it yet.
My main concern is if it is only absolute time, or if it supports relativ
Only April Fools use GMail (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why would anybody use Gmail? Is it really worth saving $2/month on email to let Google spy and catalog all of your email?
Well, you are letting somebody do that, at least potentially (and you wouldn't know if they do or not), unless you PGP everything and pretty much only email yourself.
I'm not sure it's intrinsically better to trust a few random dudes in Switzerland over a highly scrutinized publicly traded company.
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Is it really worth saving $2/month on email to let Google spy and catalog all of your email?
For most people, definitely.
How about scheduled delete? (Score:1)
I would love to have a filter to delete my email after X days. I get lots of mail generated from daily and weekly jobs. I don't need to keep for more than a week or two and it would be nice if they could delete themselves.
Why is there no simple way to automate this?
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just create a filter that send them to the bin. messages in the bin that are older than 30 days are automatically deleted
I still want them to show in my Inbox because I still need to see that jobs ran successfully. Rummaging through the trash is more inconvenient that clicking Delete.
Isaac Asimov's Fault Intolerant (Score:2)
It's like we're getting to the point in that short story by Isaac Asimov: "Fault Intolerant."
https://aparthibo.wordpress.co... [wordpress.com]
I always liked his stuff about automation. The Reeks and Wrecks from "Player Piano" always seemed pretty predictive.
Gmail really was revolutionary! (Score:2)
The confusion of something as ludicrous as 1GB free mail space being launched on a 1st of April was just sugar on top. We REALLY didn't know if Google was being serio
Reincarnation is real (Score:3)
Gmail is so slow to register emails as read (Score:2)
Long past time to discontinue it (Score:2)