Translation


by Transposh

Posts Tagged ‘E-mail’

Google’s priority mail service

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010


Don’t get surprised when you wake up tomorrow & you log on to your Gmail inbox to check your mails, you find sonething new on the left hand side taskbar. Google has this uncanny knack of surprising people & here comes a new funda called the priority mail. The Priority Inbox allows important emails to surface and stay up top, pushing the less relevant stuff into the background. When the Priority Inbox fails, well, you can train it by using the +/- buttons that are part of the new menu.
Google’s official homepage has lots many things to say. It says, Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages
you’ve deleted.When you click the Priority Inbox navigation link on the left-hand side of your mail, you’ll see messages grouped in three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else.If Priority Inbox mistakes an email as important or doesn’t flag one that’s important to you, you can teach it to make better selections. Just select the message in question, and click the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” button; they’re the buttons with plus and minus icons just to the left of the Move to and Labels drop-down menus.
When you mark a message as not important, it will move out of the Important section. Over time Priority Inbox will learn what’s important to you and incorporate the feedback you give via these buttons.The signals that Gmail uses to prioritize your email are never surfaced to other users — they’re only used to prioritize your mail for you. So if you always ignore email from Bob and those messages are marked as “not important” in your inbox, it won’t affect how Bob sees the conversation in his inbox. Exciting stuff. I am pretty excited about the new feature.

Don’t get surprised when you wake up tomorrow & you log on to your Gmail inbox to check your mails, you find sonething new on the left hand side taskbar. Google has this uncanny knack of surprising people & here comes a new funda called the priority mail. The Priority Inbox allows important emails to surface and stay up top, pushing the less relevant stuff into the background. When the Priority Inbox fails, well, you can train it by using the +/- buttons that are part of the new menu.
Google’s official homepage has lots many things to say. It says, Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted.When you click the Priority Inbox navigation link on the left-hand side of your mail, you’ll see messages grouped in three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else.If Priority Inbox mistakes an email as important or doesn’t flag one that’s important to you, you can teach it to make better selections. Just select the message in question, and click the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” button; they’re the buttons with plus and minus icons just to the left of the Move to and Labels drop-down menus.
When you mark a message as not important, it will move out of the Important section. Over time Priority Inbox will learn what’s important to you and incorporate the feedback you give via these buttons.The signals that Gmail uses to prioritize your email are never surfaced to other users — they’re only used to prioritize your mail for you. So if you always ignore email from Bob and those messages are marked as “not important” in your inbox, it won’t affect how Bob sees the conversation in his inbox. Exciting stuff. I am pretty excited about the new feature.


From CAPTCHA to PICTCHA

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Captcha

Sample Captcha

Pictcha is an experiment designed to improve security over typical text-based CAPTCHAs and enhance image search.

CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public turing test to tell computers and people apart. It ensures that an online transaction is being performed by a human rather than a computer.CAPTCHAs have been successfully used to distinguish people from computers by challenging users to decipher distorted text, a task that is relative easy for people but quite difficult for computers.
However, with the improvement of machine-learning algorithms, CAPTCHAs must be regularly updated to thwart would-be spammers.

Sample Recaptcha

Thus came the concept of ReCaptcha.About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

In the Pictcha experiment, users are shown a randomly selected Web image and challenge them to provide two descriptive labels.Passing the test requires that at least one of the user-provided labels matches a known tag for the image. The collection of known tags is generated by previous users who have tagged the same image.Pictcha is currently in experiment stage.

Try a Pictcha demo here