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Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people w
by criley2 8y ago
Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none.
In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifying Inbox back to the utterly uncontrollable insanity of Gmail. The "rollups" in Gmail don't work, the filtering is arcane and unchanged from the 2001-era, the "labels" are useless at intelligently combating spam/marketing, and my gmail inbox receives hundreds of emails a day, 0 of which I care about, and hundreds of which google desperately wants to mark important, put in my inbox, notify me about, and provide precisely 0 tools to intelligently control it.
My gmail is a nightmare of anxiety that no man could ever wrestle control over (while my Inbox is a delightful walk through an orderly park) and I am honestly just considering abandoning this gmail account.
Of course, this gmail account IS my google account, it IS my google existence.
If Google has broken email, their core app, my core account --- maybe it's time to leave.
I can't be the only one approaching Google this way. Sooner or later, they'll kill what you love about them, too.
- Hamcha 8y agoThe Inbox shutdown made me finally make the switch from Inbox/Gmail back to a mail program (Mailspring, but anything else could work), which is definitely good for me on the long term, as it means that switching to another provider will be completely seamless. I wonder if Google will ever learn that it can't teach users to like something they don't.
- criley2 8y agoThe reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.
- Flockster 8y agoMy experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.
- criley2 8y agoWhen you've had a gmail account for ~15 years, every advertiser, info reseller, marketer, phisher and spammer alive has my email at the top of their list. Is what it is, but with Inbox I had 0 issue controlling all of it, and with gmail, all of this garbage is dropped directly into my HIGHLY IMPORTANT >> INBOX with zero filtering or analysis (even though I have, no kidding, over a hundred manual filters containing THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of email addresses all of them "Mark as promotion / Never mark important / Skip the inbox / Never star / Archive immediately" and yet, every week, dozens more appear, so I add yet-another filter to the piles of hundreds, yet another dozen email addresses into the piles of thousands. And yet with all of this work, I know my inbox will be a useless disaster by next week.
- tluyben2 8y agoI have had mine for arouns 15 years and I do not recognize this. I really loved Inbox but for this aspect Gmail is not worse; I have not had to worry about spam, false positives or actual spam, at all for the past 8 years at least. I sometimes check my spam and it contains nothing I should have seen. Important contains what I want to see etc. It works perfectly; and I have been getting 1000s of mails per day, mostly spam for more than 10 years on many ancient email addresses that I still need to maintain.
- int_19h 8y agoIt used to be the case, but apparently they can't sustain it without tightening the filters. In the past few months, the false positive rate went through the roof, and I don't trust their filters anymore.
- vitaminCPP 8y agoInbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.
- izzydata 8y agoI agree, but you can archive emails in gmail and it does the same thing as setting an email to done in inbox. You can still search for them in the search box or browse the all mail category.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ssully 8y agoGoing back to Gmail, it is pretty baffling the features it is missing from inbox. Lacking bundles is bad, but having no equivalent to archive/mark all as read is terrible. I used to do a quick scroll through my junk to verify I didn't actually need anything, then click "archive all". Now I have to individually select each individual email to do a group archive/delete.
- Vinnl 8y agoHeck, not just zero-inbox, but zero-todos. By being able to set reminders, I had a single point for all my own todos, and the ones sent to me by others (aka emails). Now they advice you to add a separate pane with Google Keep or Tasks, which means you're managing them separately. I also have no idea what will happen with the reminders I've set for later than today.
- notamy 8y agoEven more so since my Google Keep reminders would show up in Inbox! Gmail doesn't do this afaik and it's frustrating.
- Goronmon 8y agoI think it's combination of: * The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement. * Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently. Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.
- duality 8y ago"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]". What ads?
- Griever 8y agoGmail now contains ads within each of the "category" tabs. Ad blockers seem to mostly block them, so that's most likely why you haven't seen anything.
- Guillaume86 8y agoGmail app on Android has ads in the mailbox.
- tyfon 8y agoAnd even more ridiculous, since they now have ads on the gmail app I get ads in my G suite account on android. They also constantly try to "unify" my email accounts so that they mix personal g suite email with my work exchange email and I have to click the top right to switch accounts. I'm quite close to removing the whole damn app too and go for K9-mail or something again (does that still get updated?) Also the web interface for gmail is absolute trash when you are using firefox, so is youtube creator studio beta. Even the "feedback" button is broken so I can't tell them it doesn't work.
- Moru 8y agoI have no idea if K9-mail gets updated but we are talking about mail, what is there to update? It still works for me.
- tikkabhuna 8y agoI completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked with user config? In Inbox I had a "Mailing List" bundle that had all my techy subscriptions and when I had free time I could see them. I could easily mark the entire bundle as read. I'm tempted to start using one of my domains as my email address and point it at a different provider, but I'll see how Gmail fares over the next few months.
- radarsat1 8y ago> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.
- fixermark 8y agoI believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoTo my mind, Gmail has always been broken because it utterly fails at being able to delete messages when acting as an IMAP backend. On iOS, this problem has generally been solved, but on the Mac, it remains a clusterfuck. I have no hope it will ever be fixed. While my primary account is still there, I moved my personal domain address to Fastmail.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI actually discovered recently Gmail has a setting for configuring this behavior over IMAP. But yes, countless times I discovered emails I had deleted on my Windows Phone just got archived silently. I wish their default was to behave like IMAP is supposed to, but my guess is they wanted to err on the side of not deleting data.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoThe settings exist, but at least on the Desktop (e.g, in a web browser), I have no confidence that the application will honor those selections. The disappointing part of all this is I specifically remember when they fixed this in iOS 3 with one 'Archive' toggle switch that in combination with Google settings actually did what I wanted. I'd be curious to know how G employees handle email inside the mothership given these constraints - do they fix it server side?
- mcintyre1994 8y agoOutlook for iOS is a pretty good app with most of the good from Inbox if you maintain near-zero inbox. I find myself using that almost all the time now because Gmail is so slow compared to it. I'd rather deal with a mobile keyboard than Gmail.
- cfontes 8y agoYeah I also was sad about Inbox, it really solved all my problems. I loved it. Now back in gmail and it sucks, it's just a cluster of emails with no way to filter thru without a lot of effort. Specially the reminders and the automatic message bundling is terrible missing, the travel bundle feature were great as well. What drives me crazy about it is that it is an awesome product, that I would probably pay a couple bucks if asked to but nothing can be done to save it. I am at loss at how to migrate and where too.
- alexhutcheson 8y agoIf you spend a week or so clicking the "unsubscribe" links in all of the unwanted emails you receive, you might be surprised with how manageable things become. I'd estimate that 99% of my unwanted emails respect the unsubscribe and don't send any more mail.
- wycy 8y agoI highly recommend doing this. I got fed up at one point and started clicking unsubscribe in every non-personal or un-important email and, without all that much effort, my inbox became infinitely more manageable pretty quickly.
- sigmaml 8y agoIt is anecdata, but in my reasonably large group of acquaintances and fellow professionals (hundreds), I haven't heard this complaint in ages! In any case, if you are having spam delivered to your inbox in GMail, it is very easy to train it to detect spam. Mark as many such as you can, and report them as spam. GMail learns very quickly.
- svachalek 8y agoThe problem is the big gray zone between spam and letters from Mom. All those mailing lists you get on because you signed into their website or thought something looked interesting once, and they're more or less behaving themselves but still more noise than you're willing to deal with most days. Inbox dealt with that category of mail, which is at least 90% of what I get, in a simply beautiful way that I can't replace. Gmail has clunky tabs with 90s style pagination and ads at the top.
- sigmaml 8y agoI understand. 1. Does any other provider have better spam filtering than GMail, though? Curious. 2. You can configure inbox to show all the messages in Primary. Then, the tabs don't appear. 3. I don't see any ads. Probably because I pay for storage?
- orasis 8y agoI’m with you. I’m putting off switching away from Inbox until they kick me off.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- neop1x 8y agoI host my email on my server for years. This is how email was designed. But unfortunately, most people tend to follow monopolistic, centralized services..