Hacker News Reader

Comment by dguaraglia | Hacker News Reader

Hah, don't get me started on the new "automatic categories". It made my work e-mail basically unusable. Github and JIRA messages would get sent to Forums/Spam/Inbox/Archive seemingly at random, even before hitting my custom filters.

Add Mavericks' Mail problematic integration with Gmail to that mix and what I had was useless filters, lots of important messages going to "the archive" without me ever knowing, and useless desktop notifications popping up for messages I didn't give a crap about. Pull requests mentioning me? Those would go to somewhere in the Archive. Completely random comments or commits on other projects I'm not working on? Yup, here, have a notification. Aaarggh!!!

Luckily I found a completely random rack that restored some sanity.

View on HN

I actually like the new automatic categories. They work decently well for me.

The main reason I like them is because I set it up so I only get notifications on my phone for the Primary category. Before, every random social network or promotion was giving me a notification on my phone, which I hated. Now I only get a notification for email I care about, and when I open up the Gmail app it fills me in on the random social and promotional crap I've "missed" out on in the meantime.

If important email ever ended up in the other categories, this would bother me, but so far it's worked well.

Notably, I don't use Gmail for work, and very rarely do I get truly critical email through my personal Gmail account.

The problem is that the definition of "important" is highly dependent on context. Github messages are not "important" in my general mail (I have, on occasion, contributed to some open source repos, that doesn't mean I want to receive an e-mail every time a contributor makes a commit), but they are rather important in my work e-mail. I guess Gmail, optimizing for the most common case, broke all the others. That is acceptable for a freebie (my personal Gmail), but not for a corporate tool you pay for (my company's Gmail).

Yeah! Yet there is no way to configure that sort of stuff. I mean, we've apparently already committed to a Kitchen Sink effort in the damn General tab, why can't we have rules to manage that stuff in there, too? Instead, I've got my phone bouncing at me like a schipperke with spam from websites I had the unfortunate circumstance to have actually signed up for.

I had this exact problem - with GitHub, JIRA, PagerDuty, AWS (both CloudWatch alerts and billing statements) all seemingly going to the most inappropriate category possible.

Had this happening on both our Gapps mail and my personal Gmail.

Drag the email to the tab you want it to go to. It will ask you if you want Gmail to do this for future messages from the same sender.

I've tried this. It worked, kinda. Considering we have some 10 active projects in the company, and each project can generate a bunch of different emails (pull request, comment, commit), I started wondering at what point my time was well spent training Google's algorithm.

(Besides, who the heck decided that categories should prioritized over my custom filters? I already had a perfectly working setup.)

Those categories might be the final push to force me out of Gmail if they remove an option to disable them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com