New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels | Hacker News Reader

New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels

gmailblog.blogspot.com

130 pointsvijaydev44 comments

While not a game changing feature for most people here (since most people have their own filters that do this), it's a great feature for the non-techies using GMail.

GMail does a great job of keeping everyone happy. An example is how they added "Folders" (edit: it's called 'move to', but it's basically folders) for people who didn't understand labels, without ruining labels.

I didn't even notice they added "folders". But yeah... not going to use this.

Sorry to call you out, but what is the point of this comment?

I have my own filters/rules which do this ("social" for FB/LinkedIn/Twitter and "not-people"), but this google labs feature does a better job at catching these types of notifications than my rules did.

I add one or two "not-people" rules a week, also, which is getting silly.

Good job, GMail team!

FYI it's "Gmail" (lowercase m).

As long as they use an uppercase M glyph in their logo, I will capitalize it however I like. :)

Yeah, that's a funny contradiction, but trust me, I work on the Gmail team.

Check out the spelling in the blog posts on Google's own blog:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

Seems to me the non-techie doesn't even know about the labs features.

Techies might use it though, if only to see how it works.

Keeping everyone happy? I'm still looking for a way to properly handle Launchpad bug reports.

Neat. I wonder what OtherInbox makes of this? Their organizer feature is basically this.

Anyone know whether this learns from your actions, in the same way as spam filtering and Priority Inbox do? i.e. if I remove the Bulk label from a conversation, does that make similar conversations less likely to be labelled as Bulk in future?

The last paragraph on the blog post seems to hint that it is not the case.

>Report mis-categorized email from the 'Reply' dropdown menu.

Is this bad news for people who do send out mass mailings with marketing campaigns etc?

Yes, extremely bad.

Email sales rely on the fact that people need to take action to get the email out of their face. It's an attention-intensive process.

This will shift that dynamic to the other side, where people will need to go out of the way to check their marketing messages. For sites like LivingSocial, it'll be especially bad because those deals may expire before they're even seen.

It will be interesting how this affects my open rate for Hacker Newsletter. I'll write something up and share if it does.

Doubtful. I think people who enable things in their gmail labs are probably already filtering out the mail from marketing campaigns they don't care about.

The cynic in me thinks this feature was built to push Groupon emails to a now auto hidden "bulk" area.

And Facebook Notifications, perhaps?

What they need to do is make "Nested Labels" and "Hide Read Labels" work nicely together.

Also for "Nested Labels", enabling a label count of the sub-labels in the main label would be great. Where did "Hide Read Labels" go?

Settings > Labels > Show in label list > show if unread

As administrator of a Google Apps account, will my messages get marked as bulk mailings if I send out something to everyone in my organization? I suppose I could ask the same about the priority inbox. Because there are certain classes of messages I may have to send out that everyone needs to read.

I guess this could be mitigated by some sort of an urgent notification from your admin feature on the Google Apps dashboard. I suspect I might send some mailings I'm content to let Gmail mark as bulk.

I hope they add the ability to re-order labels soon. Either that, or Sparrow adds some ability to re-order labels and slightly better label integration.

Why do you need to re-order labels? And do you mean in a conversation or in the sidebar?

In the sidebar.

In the side bar, and I assume he means he'd like to reorder them, in order of priority. The top labels being most important.

I'm +1 on this.

you can use special characters like @ and # in front of the labels you want to keep up at the top. you can even use the nested labels gmail lab to group them together.

Do you mean you'd like to have labels displayed on the sidebar in something other than alphabetical order?

I just name my labels with prefixes or with just single letter so they are in the right order. "a" is the most important to read, "u" is staff I rarely read at all.

I'm fed up with Gmail lately. Priority Inbox is a mess. And lots of mail keeps going to 'Spam', which before I moved was hidden. Most 'Spam' is from my support ticket software. I mark it 'Not spam', and it still goes there. Perhaps it's time for someone to release a simple online mail service..

Add the sender e-mail address to your address book. If that doesn't help, create a filter. Priority inbox can be turned off.

While the smart label feature itself works in Google Apps, it seems like the configuration support (editing the default filters etc) doesn't. I can't seem to edit any of the smart-label filters through the Settings dialog.

I'm disappointed how they solved this problem. I was hoping they would use clustering to figure out what label to apply based on whats already been labelled. I thought that was the next logical step from 'Priority Inbox'.

This is nice, but please: release a feature that lets you add notes to messages already!

I have so many threads in which I've left open drafts to be able to add a few comments.

I use the "Add to Tasks" option to add notes to messages. You can try that if it works for you.

Can you somehow get to the note from the message (as opposed to get to the message from the task)?

I turned this on and a ton of my auto archived mail started showing up in my inbox. Seems cool though but I immediately turned it off.

I'm not seeing this in my (paid, google apps) account - does anyone know if it's rolled out for everyone?

Ditching custom labels and filters in favor of this. Bye bye bacn.

Agreed. Eager to see how well these work in the longterm.

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