You know how I know that we’re reaching the limits of email innovation? Because Gmail is now devoting much of its time to embarrassment prevention in Gmail Labs. The latest is another small, but useful feature that they’re humorously calling: Got the Wrong Bob?
As the name implies, when you turn this feature on in Labs, Gmail will scan an email’s recipients to see if you are accidentally sending a message to someone you don’t want to be sending it to. Here’s a good example of when this will be useful: Michael Arrington often sends the TechCrunch writers emails about stories but sometimes he’ll include Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in those emails when he means to include TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. Typing in “Jason” populates Calacanis first, and Mike usually doesn’t realize it until it’s too late.
While that’s never caused a major problem, you can imagine how it easily could, and undoubtedly has, for a lot of people. So now Gmail will look at your history of grouping people together in emails and make sure that you want to actually send it to all the recipients if there is some anomaly in that list. If there is, you will see it below the “To:” field, with a red “Did you mean” followed by the contact’s name that you may have meant to send the message to.
This is similar to Google’s “Suggest more recipients” Labs feature, and as such, they’re renaming that, “Don’t forget Bob.” I can’t quite tell if Google is trying to make a “The Bobs” joke from Office Space (which I am), or a What About Bob? joke. Either would be good, I suppose.
Retarded.
from that clever and constructive comment I understand that you obviously have never handled sensitive e-mail
Yes, i got your back on this one
This could actually be useful… Unless I am only sending to one person
I bet Microsoft wish we’d forgot Bob.
ha. true. i had it!
Does Jason have a blog with all the mis-fired emails
yes, good.
http://peopleve...ction-hero.html
What the new one from google.. its would be usefull for those who have a smilar name on their contact list.
Could be very useful. I’ve had a short embarrassing email exchange with a senior partner at a NYC law firm who was the wrong Rosini. Auto complete has its downside, particularly when rushed and under stress.
Of course now that Jason Calacanis has received so many emails together with that group, Gmail will now think he belongs in the group and will ask to autocorrect Jason Kincaid’s email address to Calacanis.
have to wait and see it in action, but until then, I keep using groups.
“reaching the limits of email innovation?”
I assume you are kidding, right? Just think about all of the problems that you have with your email, with connecting with calendars, with ease of use, and you will see there is so much more to do.
Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others should allow developers to create 3rd party apps for their mail/ calendar systems. Then we will see innovation – and the one to do the best job with it will be the clear email winner.
Anyone willing to trust a 3rd party plugin with your yahoo/ gmail contacts and data?
It’s logical conclusion time…
Eventually we’ll see a beloved email assistant emerge to save us all from future embarrassment.
That fantastic…I know I’ve accidentally sent emails to people that shouldn’t have received them because of the auto-complete feature in Gmail.
There is nothing worse than that feeling when you send the ultra sensitive email to the wrong person. I hope this thing works because it would allow me to start coming into work hungover and prevent me from having to be attentive to the spelling of my co-workers names. This my friends it what we call progress…
http://www.lock.../lockers/pwells
Make sure to get rid of the Mail Goggles lab.
I see this issue a lot with Outlook and emails going to similar names but the wrong people. Double check is the Microsoft solution.
Hi Steve–Using Xobni would help you out in this case as well. When you type in a contact’s name, you can view their photo, company name, and other info to ensure that you’re emailing the right person. We want to eliminate the need for that double-checking in Outlook (among other things). Hope this helps!
How about just creating a contact group like everyone else does?
Can someone explain to me why this “problem” is higher on the list than scheduled e-mail send? There have been many occasions on which I wrote up an e-mail very late at night and didn’t want to send it immediately, as it might create a bad impression. So I’ve had to set my alarm and wake up early to click the Send button. Don’t other have this problem? Isn’t it more pressing than the kind of problem they are tackling with this new feature?
I think this is a great feature – small yet useful incremental improvements over there at Gmail.
But you’re right Brawley- scheduled email send has been noticeably absent from Gmail’s arsenal of feature enhancements, and like you say, would probably be among the most useful of them. There are 1000 use cases for this feature, with yours being a very common one.
Also, maybe I’ve missed something somewhere, but does Gmail actually not yet have the option to include Read Receipts?
I always triple check my recipients.
yeah, well, I always QUADRUPLE check mine!
ha
Nice new feature, but doesn’t appear to be immediately obvious. I’d prefer a pop-up.
This is an incredibly useful feature. it’s amazing how they’re sweating the details.
As all Bobs fans know, the right Bobs are Amy, Dan, Gunnar, Janey, Joe, Lori, Matthew, and Richard.
Whatever! Don’t get too used to any Labs Features as they might magically disappear without reason explanation or cause to return at the whims of the Gmail Engineers.
And I hope FOX and Mike Judge either sue the piss out of Google for calling it that or at the least force Google to change the name.
As Gmail (or Google) does not in any manner do justice to such a great movie.
hi bob this is bob I’m attaching the song of bob marley that I promised you and I am putting on cc all our friends who are called bob
…At that poing google crashed forever in an infinite loop….
It would be great if they developed a function that let’s you cancel an e-mail after it’s been sent.
er, it already has that feature. it’s called “undo send” … toward the bottom of the feature list under the labs tab in settings.
yeah only works for a few seconds though because google is actually holding it back from being sent.
What happens when you have two people with exactly the same name in your address book? This is very common in large multinationals, particularly in certain cultures (Asia, Africa) where certain surnames are very common. For eg in my last job, there were two Linda Laus in the organisation. many other names were duplicated as well.
+1 for the photo, because I love Michael Bolton
So, if you have mistaken often enough, Google will help you keep mistaking? Great!
)
now if they could only do this with text messages too….. my ceo is susan and my best friend is susan. Hasn’t happened yet but you never know