Hacker News Reader

Comment by mklim | Hacker News Reader

> That’s why you can now block specific email addresses in Gmail [...] Future mail will go to the spam folder (and you can always unblock in Settings).

It's nice to have a one-click button for it, but this was already available by configuring a filter. You just need to select all emails from a particular address and then choose to always mark them as spam or send them directly into the trash. From the headline I was thinking that they changed it so that you could keep email from an address from ever being delivered to your account in any form.

View on HN

Any feature complicated enough to implement is indistinguishable from a missing feature.

Would be interested to hear why it took so long to add this one-click functionality, which is common across clients, to Gmail. There must have been some internal disagreement on its implementation?

Still, this is an easier way to apply that filter. I've found filters to not always be that easy to set up... so I can only imagine how average users deal with them, aka probably not at all.

I wonder though if they have taken it out of the filter flow. Filters are interesting in that they can really slow things down, and if a previous one fires before the send to trash one does, sometimes it has a different result. If they have called this out as a behavior that can happen on the inbound pipeline, and more importantly if they can reflect it back as a 5xx error to the sender, it would be nice improvement.

Seems like the Inbox team has rethought the filter flow at least in terms of UI and there are clearly some architecture/backend changes too. Perhaps this new "block" flow in GMail is a reflection of working together with the Inbox team.

Filters apply on a dumb level: do this if exactly this address, etc. I hope this would apply on a higher, "do what I mean" level: attempt to figure out if each new From address is actually the same person or organization as one you've already blocked, and, if so, add it to the "contact" of the blocked party so that it's blocked too.

The failure case for that logic is pretty bad.

Depends on how they expose the UI for it. You could have a bin at the bottom of your inbox labelled "messages from recently auto-blocked senders"—with the messages still technically in the Spam folder and liable to be erased after 30 days, but exposed so you don't have to hunt through your "confirmed spam" to see them.

Throw in a little tweak to detect if you go on vacation (e.g. no messages opened in the last week, etc.) and pause the "decay" of messages in the spam folder until you get back, and it'd be just as safe as the system we have now.

I think there's a large enough population of users that filters are too complicated, and this feature is very usable for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com