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Article admits it isn't a bug then continues calling it a "bug." Also the $187M figure is just pulled out of the air. Essentially Gmail (and other mail service

Article admits it isn't a bug then continues calling it a "bug." Also the $187M figure is just pulled out of the air. Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. Users are confused by it, and clicking the oldest password reset link (expired) rather than the newest. Claims that users being unable to reset their passwords costs Expedia $187M.

Brahma111 8y ago
Oh..and the clickbaity headline got me again.. All while I was looking for how some hacker exploited it and got Expedia's business
feketegy 8y ago
LOL, I guess it's anything for clicks these days...
Grue3 8y ago
Nah, the author does have a point. There's something fundamentally wrong with how Gmail collapses messages. I have email notifications from a certain web store when some of the items I might be interested in come in stock/for preorder. I always read them. Years after I started using it, I discovered that I actually miss reading about 30% of these messages. How does this happen? Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread. And yet this thread looks identical to a single message. So I click on the thread, read the first message, see the email footer and go back to Inbox to read the next one. This marks the entire thread read even though I didn't actually read the subsequent messages. So I never come around to read them. I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read.
- mrlala 8y ago
  >Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread Yeah you are right, I remember when they implemented that "random grouping" to confuse their users and make email unreadable. In other news, they group messages with the same subject into a single thread (or rather, how the subject changes when someone clicks reply like adding re:). So when someone replies, it stays in the same thread. It's clear as day that there are messages below because they are showing. There's a number next to the email thread you clicked on with how many replies there are. >I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read. So.. you do realize just how many years people have been using gmail, right? And you believe that most users are missing basically every email that is a reply? I mean.. how does your mind work dude?
  - dang 8y ago
    No personal swipes on HN, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Also, long exchanges with someone who uses Outlook as a client are incredibly painful.
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    Does it not collapse them? I have a few people I used to talk with that had the included reply but GMAIL just replaced it with [...] that I could click to expand.
- uberman 8y ago
  I came to say the same thing, but you said it first and probably better than I.
- Jach 8y ago
  When gmail was invite-only, the threaded collapsing feature was amazing and perfect for what I got my invite to do (roleplaying). Since then after innumerable redesigns and behavior changes, I don't even remember what the old behavior or look really was like, except I liked it and had fewer complaints. These days I'm annoyed that gmail doesn't collapse messages enough, i.e. the "random" threading or not threading of emails that seem like they ought to be part of the same thread (some seem only different by time). I get annoyed with their UI on multi-party emails. And you have a point about marking the whole thread as read when you didn't even scroll the wheel once, though you do have a number indication before drilling into it of how many message are there. Make the number bigger? If you try to reply it's also obvious there are more messages. At least it knows you read earlier messages in the thread and collapses them by default. There's still a lot of improvements for mail UX. I don't expect google will be the one to make them, but maybe they'll copy the other people who do.
cesarb 8y ago
> Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. IMO, gmail is in the wrong here. If the message id is not in the References or the In-Reply-To header, it's a new conversation.
- dhimes 8y ago
  They should just make that a configuration option. I prefer it works like Thunderbird, where no new mail is collapsed (but I can thread them if I wish). EDIT: Hmmm. It appears that I CAN change that.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    How?
    - dhimes 8y ago
      I went to settings (gear thingy->settings) and set "conversation view" to "off."
kevingadd 8y ago
This is kind of a silly argument to make. How does an end user have any way to know whether a particular behavior is a bug or intentional when the behavior is actively bad? Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it? Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of. I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug! A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way. The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.
- CWuestefeld 8y ago
  This combination of behaviors has long been the key to me hating gmail. I can't begin to estimate the number of messages I've missed because of how gmail handles threads.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
I had the exact same problem setting up my Dad and My sisters new ipads at Christmas.
user5994461 8y ago
Author here. Just wanted to say that the metrics are not pulled out of thin air. I prefer to refrain from discussing the internal accounting of firms I worked for.

Brahma111 8y ago

Oh..and the clickbaity headline got me again.. All while I was looking for how some hacker exploited it and got Expedia's business

feketegy 8y ago

LOL, I guess it's anything for clicks these days...

Grue3 8y ago

Nah, the author does have a point. There's something fundamentally wrong with how Gmail collapses messages. I have email notifications from a certain web store when some of the items I might be interested in come in stock/for preorder. I always read them. Years after I started using it, I discovered that I actually miss reading about 30% of these messages. How does this happen? Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread. And yet this thread looks identical to a single message. So I click on the thread, read the first message, see the email footer and go back to Inbox to read the next one. This marks the entire thread read even though I didn't actually read the subsequent messages. So I never come around to read them. I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read.

mrlala 8y ago
>Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread Yeah you are right, I remember when they implemented that "random grouping" to confuse their users and make email unreadable. In other news, they group messages with the same subject into a single thread (or rather, how the subject changes when someone clicks reply like adding re:). So when someone replies, it stays in the same thread. It's clear as day that there are messages below because they are showing. There's a number next to the email thread you clicked on with how many replies there are. >I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read. So.. you do realize just how many years people have been using gmail, right? And you believe that most users are missing basically every email that is a reply? I mean.. how does your mind work dude?
- dang 8y ago
  No personal swipes on HN, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mywittyname 8y ago
Also, long exchanges with someone who uses Outlook as a client are incredibly painful.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  Does it not collapse them? I have a few people I used to talk with that had the included reply but GMAIL just replaced it with [...] that I could click to expand.
uberman 8y ago
I came to say the same thing, but you said it first and probably better than I.
Jach 8y ago
When gmail was invite-only, the threaded collapsing feature was amazing and perfect for what I got my invite to do (roleplaying). Since then after innumerable redesigns and behavior changes, I don't even remember what the old behavior or look really was like, except I liked it and had fewer complaints. These days I'm annoyed that gmail doesn't collapse messages enough, i.e. the "random" threading or not threading of emails that seem like they ought to be part of the same thread (some seem only different by time). I get annoyed with their UI on multi-party emails. And you have a point about marking the whole thread as read when you didn't even scroll the wheel once, though you do have a number indication before drilling into it of how many message are there. Make the number bigger? If you try to reply it's also obvious there are more messages. At least it knows you read earlier messages in the thread and collapses them by default. There's still a lot of improvements for mail UX. I don't expect google will be the one to make them, but maybe they'll copy the other people who do.

cesarb 8y ago

> Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. IMO, gmail is in the wrong here. If the message id is not in the References or the In-Reply-To header, it's a new conversation.

dhimes 8y ago
They should just make that a configuration option. I prefer it works like Thunderbird, where no new mail is collapsed (but I can thread them if I wish). EDIT: Hmmm. It appears that I CAN change that.
- acct1771 8y ago
  How?
  - dhimes 8y ago
    I went to settings (gear thingy->settings) and set "conversation view" to "off."

kevingadd 8y ago

This is kind of a silly argument to make. How does an end user have any way to know whether a particular behavior is a bug or intentional when the behavior is actively bad? Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it? Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of. I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug! A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way. The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.

CWuestefeld 8y ago
This combination of behaviors has long been the key to me hating gmail. I can't begin to estimate the number of messages I've missed because of how gmail handles threads.

C1sc0cat 8y ago

I had the exact same problem setting up my Dad and My sisters new ipads at Christmas.

user5994461 8y ago

Author here. Just wanted to say that the metrics are not pulled out of thin air. I prefer to refrain from discussing the internal accounting of firms I worked for.