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Yahoo Tries to Improve Your Inbox
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jan 10, 2008 10:22 AM
from the can't-get-much-worse dept.
from the can't-get-much-worse dept.
Jamie found a story about Yahoo's plans to improve your inbox by incorporating more information into the sorting. Simple thread order or chronological order ignores tons of information that might be available on social networking websites. That way your friends will be more prominently displayed. Automating this could beat the hell out of a hundred lines of procmail recipes.
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Finally (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
From the goodness of Yahoo's heart? Yahoo has a..? (Score:2)
Yahoo played so many tricks that I learned to stay away from it; I haven't seen Yahoo in years.
Now I just visited the Yahoo web site [yahoo.com]. As I write this it says, "Pulse - What Yahoos Are Into". That's typical of Yahoo's respect for it's customers. A "yahoo" is "an uncultivated or boorish person" [reference.com].
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Grammar correction (Score:3, Funny)
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Funny, the spam filter on my Yahoo works great and has for a long while. I get maybe one out of a hundred that slips through.
Then you are blessed. But, my yahoo account was established over 10 years ago, so plenty of time has passed for spammers to find my account. The reason I stopped using my y! account was specifically to do with the spam not being caught, as in, a hundred a day...or more. And I dutifully submitted them to the spam filters. I am much happier with my gmail account.
Ditto (Score:2)
Same for me. Yahoo is now my throwaway account for useless website registrations, and even then I'm so disgusted by the amount of spam when I log in that, out of pity, I try to mark a little of it before logging out. I don't know if they're cross-referencing spam reports from different users, though.
Good old Oddpost Mail at work? (Score:2, Informative)
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vs. procmail? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:vs. procmail? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 21st Century, procmail syntax just doesn't cut it anymore. It's just like Sendmail... works great, but a complete bear to configure.
Parent
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I used to know procmail like the back of my hand.
My procmailrc (which I stopped using FWIW) is almost 400 lines at its last incantation. Sure, after all those hours learning the syntax, and after adapting Timo's http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html [uwasa.fi] (great page BTW) procmail testing scripts to work on my computer I could indeed do pretty much anything with my email. Procmail is also pretty much bug free (I heard that *every* single C library call has its return values checked for all possible error
is e-mail that deficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a solution looking for a problem? The first thing that comes to mind for me around these new features is, how do I explain this to my parents when now, after years of getting the hang of Outlook (and others), they're seeing e-mail messages arranged in some heuristic-based order they don't understand. (And, yeah, I know for now this is Yahoo only, but it always seems that all jump on the bandwagon and add their version of the latest gee-whiz new e-mail behavior.)
Heck, I could see it as throwing me... all of a sudden something that should have been a very important note falls to the bottom of the queue because it wasn't a correspondent in my "linkedin" network.
And, it's a whole new path for spammers to investigate and abuse.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters, even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't likely to be much help. You still have a ton of e-mail to sort out with your own personal heuristics.
With inverted indices, IMO, there's enough power at your fingertips to manage your information your own way. Letting Yahoo sift through the chaff to extract phone numbers, restaurant recommendations, etc., starts to make me nervous... again, with spammers figuring ways to get into your lists.... no thanks.
I know I don't have to use these kinds of new services. But I also know I'm going to get called upon, as always, to explain to family and friends, what's going on with their new mail interactions. At some point these automagic features transcend their explainability. Reminds me a little of Lotus NOTES... a cool and interesting solution religiously doted upon by its followers, but not really a solution to an existing problem but more a solution looking for a problem.
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I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters,
even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're
getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't
likely to be much help.
Absolutely agreed. I already know more or less what's going on with my friends (and they can call me if somehow I missed an important email).
On the contrary, when a more-or-less stranger emails me because they might want to hire me for a project, or I get that rare email from a credit card company saying that my account has been locked for possible fraud, these may be all first-time, no-social-network emails, but they're far more important.
It's better to just support good email triage skills. I remember
gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
it goes against Googles "search not sort" line of taught,
even tho it would be a useful addition to gmail to be able to sort emails
fairplay yahoo, their webmail is already alot more user friendly than gmail
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Well, you can fake it easily enough by having mail skip the inbox and using tags like folders. I do that with high-traffic mailing lists that I don't want cluttering my inbox.
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Re:gmail (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Search and sort are mathematically dual operations. Given a sort order, you can take the first item as the result of a search. This maps all orderings into searches. Given a search, if you repeatedly remove the top item and redo the search on the remaining items, you'll get a sort order. This maps all searches into sort orderings.
Suggestion (Score:2)
Re:Suggestion (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I wanted Outlook, I would use Outlook. I don't. I want simple mail and if they can put the little paper clip thing in the "new" version, it makes no sense that they can't do it with "old" version. That and too much spam are m
How about things that matter to users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about things that matter to users? (Score:5, Informative)
http://help.yahoo.com/l/ca/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/contactus/ [yahoo.com]
Parent
Re:How about things that matter to users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Great, another billboard in my Email (Score:5, Interesting)
As it is now:
-You login
-you get a customizable billboard that lets you preview (but not touch) your email.
-You must click "Email" to get to your email.
-It then opens a new window or tab with your email to keep the Ads intact and *hopefully* in your view.
I can't wait to see how this *new Feature* will enhance the billboard and make my email that much slower and harder to use.
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Gmail? (Score:2, Insightful)
It Ain't Broke - Don't Fix It (Score:2)
I don't understand what's up with Yahoo!
They tried a replacement of their My Yahoo! page, which seemingly turned out to be an abysmal attempt at copying Sharepoint or some other CMS. It sucks and as long as the "old" My Yahoo! exists, I'm going to stick with it.
If their efforts to "improve" my Inbox turn out to be just as bad, I'm moving on. I already have Google and Hotmail accounts, and am more willing to wade through the spam more than I am to endure a horribly designed and "broken" UI.
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Reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of false positives would be extremely high. Potentially important one-of emails would be ranked of less importance than the typically pointless continuous back and forth banter with people at social networking sites. Unrelated emails would be sorted into threads they don't belong unless the system can contextually link emails with unprecedented accuracy.
The article goes into a rather contrived example of how Yahoo figures out that a bunch of emails are all related to choosing a restaurant. It automatically groups all the emails together into a thread by context (By what criteria? Because they were all received in the last week and contain the names of restaurants?), then displays the restaurant on a map (why do I need to see a map to choose what type of food I want to eat?), and finally tries to make the decision for you by looking at your previous reviews of various restaurants. This whole scenario is ludicrous. Just because I liked a restaurant, does that mean it is an appropriate place for some sort of business meeting? What if it is too casual? How can they infer that because a restaurant is my highest ranked, that is the only place I would want to eat in the future?
In the end, I bet this system will amount to nothing more than harvesting your contacts from multiple social sites.
Dan East
What makes them think this is good? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I use IMAP and a small number of simple sorting rules. Messages from X go into box Y. Obvious spam is quarantined. Both are double-checked by me. If Yahoo wants to improve the email experience, they should start by working with others to fix the broken mail protocols that allowed the proliferation of spam in the first place, not find a way to make social networking spam more obvious in my inbox.
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why we don't use Yahoo webmail in China (Score:2, Funny)
Yahoo gives your account info to the Communist government. You can do a search (persumably not a Yahoo search) on the fucking web about a case that Yahoo giving the account access and mail contents of a human-right activist to the Party-runned security departments, who later imprisoned him. I'm not feeling like doing the search myself because I don't quite like triggering the Great Firewall this week. I am an Anonymous Coward. (Big-Brother: No you're not.)
As for Google, if only they could implement mail se
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There's only two features missing from Yahoo Mail. (Score:4, Interesting)
The second is IMAP, so I can sync my email and calendar to my phone on the fly.
That's all that's left. I already prefer it to Gmail by far, if they add that in, I won't even think Gmail can catch up.
Re:There's only two features missing from Yahoo Ma (Score:2)
Why? They don't bring in more revenu to Yahoo.
Now if you could figure out how to make money from such a thing...
(Sad how Yahoo is so short-sighted)
What's missing from GMail? (Score:2)
What does Yahoo offer you that GMail is lacking? Serious question.
Just leave me alone Yahoo! (Score:2)
Gmail does do sorting (Score:2)
spam filters (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
Does this mean yahoo will now sort stuff myspace way (whatever that is) instead of "the way it works"?
Yahoo can Improve my Inbox... (Score:2)
I tried to reactivate an old forum account last night. I knew that I had a long history of e-mail correspondence with the administrator, and all I had to do was search for the guy's name in my Yahoo mail history and it would pop up. The trouble was, the earliest e-mail Yahoo search was able to produce was from November of 2004. That's a little over 3 years ago. Most of the important correspondence was before November of 2004, and I was unable to use my own e-mail records (which had
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As far as I'm aware, Google doesn't have any age limit on what they retain. You can keep as much e-mail as your storage limit will allow.
Too little, too late. (Score:2)
And why if I am telling you something is not working (like in Yahoo hiding messages which are reachable by clicking Next once reading one) I am told everything is OK like if I was a rabid lunatic?
I asked to talk to somebody that understood how email works just to be told more nonsense from a poorly paid tech support reading a script.
I needed to talk to the circus's animal trainer but they kept sending me wi
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Try out the greatest service ever [wikipedia.org]!