Flooded by email? Think the only solution is to give all your data to Google or Microsoft because they have smart inboxes that help you handle the flood of mails? We have good news for you!
Today Nextcloud Mail introduces a Priority Inbox. It uses machine learning to classify important messages as such and shows your mail sorted into the categories important, favorites and others. And the best part: unlike approaches employed by public cloud services, the learning happens locally and only uses the data from individual users to protect your privacy.
Busy? Machine learning to the rescue
Machine learning is all the rage in Silicon Valley. And of course they are vacuuming up massive amounts of data, often in schemes that are downright unethical. Just watch the latest item on facial recognition by John Oliver to get a taste.
For us at Nextcloud, we know how important it is to get at your data quickly and efficiently. That is why Nextcloud shows you relevant files on top of your file view when you log in, and why we show contacts you frequently share with in the share dialog. We also use machine learning for security, training a neural network on your logins so we can detect when something out of the ordinary happens and warn you that somebody might be trying to hack your account. But this machine learning happens entirely local, on your server, using your data. Protecting your privacy. And it works well, as the millions of users of Nextcloud Hub can attest to.
Introducing the Priority Inbox: learning to get better
Today, we’re proud to announce another use of machine learning in Nextcloud with the Priority Inbox in Nextcloud Mail. The Priority inbox separates messages into important, favorite and other messages. This gives you a more efficient way to sort and find what matters in your inbox, even when you are flooded with large amounts of email.
The priority inbox builds on the recent introduction of a message cache, improving performance of the Mail app for users especially on slow or very basic IMAP servers. A machine learning model is trained on your emails, looking at whom you email with frequently and other factors. We’ve been testing the model for a while now and it works quite well. But we will also improve it in the future, adding more factors and tuning the existing ones. More importantly, the model learns from manual classification of emails as important by you, the user. This means that the accuracy of the Priority Inbox gets better over time, as you use it and correct its decisions!
This release of Mail also introduces multi-select, improved search and other user interface and interaction changes. It is already available in the app store and you can get it right now!
Above you can see a screenshot of the priority inbox in action.
Of course, we will expand our use of machine learning in Nextcloud even further and if you’re interested in the subject and like to employ it to help millions of users get their work done every day, you can get involved!
Clearly you have a distorted view of what this release was about. You could simply check the changelog for all the changes that went into v1.4 but hey, why not first rant on a forum, right?
Also https://github.com/nextcloud/mail/projects/10 has all the “other places” and it shouldn’t be hard to discover that we are working on many of the basics. Most people that are involved in the community know that and they appreciate the progress.
What is the big deal with working on the basic features and things that greatly improve the usefulness of this app?
I don’t have a distorted picture here.
This article is about machine learning.
Just casually about the other new features.
And I left out my opinion on that one.
If (my) opinion is presented as a rant, I don’t understand the sense behind a forum.
The choice of words of the first post were of course not correct.
I always read the change log and the roadmap in git with interest.
Even as a full-time developer I know that nothing is that simple anymore and that everything is a moving target.
But when I see that they have been working on basic features like changing the sort order #679 for over 3 years I wonder if the focus is not wrong.
I personally and customers who use it professionally (small business) just don’t understand why such things still don’t work.
There is a danger that these people will switch to other paid products.
I see a lot of potential in NC but there is still a lot to do.
So please do not feel personally offended.
All of this creates a community, not a single person.
To shed more light on this, please note that the app is not new. It’s been worked on by people of the community for a long time, even when our software had another name. As it happened, I got hired by Nextcloud GmbH but the app remained more of a side project. Only recently this has become a priority for us as more customers want fully integrated groupware in Nextcloud. I hope that explains why some of the feature requests are old.
Christoph, I need to say that the mail app is a great feature for Nextcloud. I really look forward to use Nextcloud Mail as my main mailclient for my company. The deep integration in Nextcloud is already impressive. Of course it’s not yet that mailclient which could be used in a normal business environment (to me, folder management + drag and drop would be essential).
So: Thanks for putting all the effort into the mail App.
btw: Any plans yet, for a Android app?
I’m closing this topic as the sole purpose was the release announcement. For any other discussion start a new topic and report bugs via Github.