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For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of whic

For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions" tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior to Google's classification errors producing this particular anxiety I used to basically treat the "Promotions" tab as spam to never look at. Now I'm going through all of it with prejudice which means I'm waaaaaaay more aware of marketing drivel than I used to be. As such, I'm pretty sure this "error" is intentional on Google's part to produce exactly this outcome of drawing eyeballs to inbox advertising.

labria 5y ago
I just disable this filtering. It’s more damage than good nowadays…
- taftster 5y ago
  Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how this would be useful to me.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking. Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
    - jareklupinski 5y ago
      sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon as the category feature came out i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get my total inbox as clean as it is now :)
      - taftster 5y ago
        Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter comes next, if they keep sending.
        KMnO4 5y ago
        Gmail has a “report spam and unsubscribe” button which I use liberally.
        taftster 5y ago
        I feel guilty using it the first go. I figure I will click on their unsubscribe link first. And then I will click the report spam button if they continue to send me email Unfortunately, all I'm probably doing is just confirming my email address to generate future "mailing list" subscriptions.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You don't get spurious false positives; you can predict every false positive in your head before you even get the email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to prevent it from happening in the first place! “Unknown / trusted / spam senders” lists are a basic implementation of this concept.
      - jez 5y ago
        This is why Inbox's Bundles feature was amazing. User-defined rules, emails either show up live or in digest form throughout the day, shown in your (one) inbox, not in some panel where secondary "labels" or "folders" are relegated to. Collapsed by default, but expandable. Gmail thought that adding Snooze was enough to get feature parity and kill Inbox, but Bundles were by far the feature keeping me on Inbox.
    - selcuka 5y ago
      I, for one, don't use that feature because I use two email addresses. People who know me personally only know one of them, and I use the other for registrations and subscriptions.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        This has also had the greatest effect for me. If you don't share your main email with sketchy reselling parties, it remains surprising clean. And this on a 10 year old+ account.
    - kjaftaedi 5y ago
      I think it's the difference between people that unsubscribe from lists and those that don't. If you're a regular unsubscriber, your email box is only ever filled with relevant important items. I do the same thing with my phone notifications. If my phone ever gets a notification, it's something that directly concerns me. I don't know how people live getting bombarded with stuff all day, but like you said, everyone's different.
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    I get quite a bit of emails that are not completely spam, but by no means urgent to see. The filtering has been great to let me focus on things I need to see immediately, without having to scroll through 50 different promotional things
znpy 5y ago
If you didn't realize it, Google has managed to get you to waster your time actually going through advertising (instead of putting that on the side for you). I'm really surprised most people aren't realizing this.
- chabad360 5y ago
  Huh. I thought it had something to do with my subscription to oss-security (the plain-text email causing some confusion in the filters). But clearly it's not just me...
uclastudent1000 5y ago
Just made an account to let you know that this specific comment made me check my Promotions tab, which happened to contain… an invitation to schedule a software engineering interview. Would definitely have missed that if I didn’t get bored and read this HN thread midway through my lecture.
- chungus 5y ago
  go bruins
- dripton 5y ago
  Life pro tip: most recruiters can't write emails that look like they came from humans rather than spambots. If you're actively looking for a job, check all your spam folders daily. I can't tell you how many actual job leads have ended up in mine.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Also, recruiters sends large numbers of similar emails so they look like a spammer to the filters. Then if people who get them just mark them a spam rather than deleting or responding, the problem is compounded.
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      Depending on your definition of spam, the recruiters might actually be sending spam. I once had a recruiter try to hire me for the company I was already working at and had clearly indicated on my Linkedin...
    - Piskvorrr 5y ago
      People who get them might not have opted into them. That is spam, by definition. Elephant in the room of "foot-in-the-door marketing"? I guess.
  - abraae 5y ago
    Many recruiters are sending their emails from a system, not writing them by hand. They look they came from a template, because they did. Add to that that when that recruitment system was implemented, the recruiter probably didn't bother updating/customizing the default templates, making their emails just the same as everyone else's.
zz865 5y ago
Its actually worth going through and unsubscribing to those promo emails just to make this easier.
ksaj 5y ago
This is an unusual problem that I also witness over and over again. The unusual part is that I'll get same-source emails (eg: mailing lists that I follow) scattered between two different tabs, so it is like Google only forgets where they go sometimes. I drag them to the proper tab each time, but it doesn't seem to fix anything.
kazinator 5y ago
This HN submission is getting spam from gmail accounts, not to your gmail account.
chj 5y ago
This also happened to me. A very important email was put under the promotions. Usually I just kept the gmail tab open and didn't check my phone. Fortunately for me, I noticed this mail on my phone when I was clearing the unread status. At the same time, all sorts of ads fall into my inbox repeatedly, even I deliberately mark them as spam or junk. ( Being cautious, I just checked the promotions again. And there is another important email lying. WTF!)
nikau 5y ago
The only reliable low maintenance solution is to get your own domain with a catch all mail service. Then for every email interaction with a 3rd party you make a unique address like amazondotcom3823@yourdomain.com. You can then just add rules for each incoming mail domain to send them to a junk folder, especially if it was was a one time transaction and subsequent emails are just going to be marketing junk. It also lets you know who has had their mailing lists compromised as there is virtually zero chance someone would guess the email address like the example above.
- dahart 5y ago
  > Then for every email interaction with a 3rd party you make a unique address Does that work for you? Have you caught many companies sharing your address? I’ve been making unique addresses for a decade, and it has been a complete failure. I haven’t caught any companies sharing them, and it hasn’t stopped spam in the slightest. I’m not sure where spammers get my mail email address from, but they do, and so far I’m not seeing them get the individualized addresses, like ever.
  - nikau 5y ago
    Yep I've noticed a few, most of the breaches were disclosed to the public which is good. I've stopped using those services so I've just send them straight to trash now as they get non stop spam. Before setting up a catch all domain I had 3 distinct email addresses I used as high/medium/low priority which helped, but its much simpler with the catch all domain as it goes into the same inbox, just with different "To:" addresses that you can easily filter on - I just right click in outlook and select move all mail to recipient to junk. To be fair most of the mail I get is marketing and I could probably unsubscribe, its just easier to make a rule to filter them to junk.
    - 13of40 5y ago
      I actually have a rule in my work email that tosses everything that contains the word "unsubscribe" and where I am the sole recipient. Hasn't done me wrong for years, as far as I know.
atregir 5y ago
I could have written this. The exact same thing happens to me and now I am realizing you might be right and it might be on purpose so we scroll through all the unnecessary ads. Arrgh.
markogresak 5y ago
You can disable the grouping feature. What I did to reduce the noise in my mailbox is to unsubscribe from all marketing emails, and I move the ones that still come through to spam folder. It was a bit tedious at first, but now gmail is doing a pretty good job at automatically filtering out senders that do not respect my request to unsubscribe.
samstave 5y ago
There is no way to sort in gmail satisfactorily that I know? Like sort by subject, sender, etc... I can search, but I cant SORT. Am I missing something obvious?

labria 5y ago

I just disable this filtering. It’s more damage than good nowadays…

taftster 5y ago
Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how this would be useful to me.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking. Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon as the category feature came out i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get my total inbox as clean as it is now :)
    - taftster 5y ago
      Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter comes next, if they keep sending.
      - KMnO4 5y ago
        Gmail has a “report spam and unsubscribe” button which I use liberally.
        taftster 5y ago
        I feel guilty using it the first go. I figure I will click on their unsubscribe link first. And then I will click the report spam button if they continue to send me email Unfortunately, all I'm probably doing is just confirming my email address to generate future "mailing list" subscriptions.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You don't get spurious false positives; you can predict every false positive in your head before you even get the email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to prevent it from happening in the first place! “Unknown / trusted / spam senders” lists are a basic implementation of this concept.
    - jez 5y ago
      This is why Inbox's Bundles feature was amazing. User-defined rules, emails either show up live or in digest form throughout the day, shown in your (one) inbox, not in some panel where secondary "labels" or "folders" are relegated to. Collapsed by default, but expandable. Gmail thought that adding Snooze was enough to get feature parity and kill Inbox, but Bundles were by far the feature keeping me on Inbox.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    I, for one, don't use that feature because I use two email addresses. People who know me personally only know one of them, and I use the other for registrations and subscriptions.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      This has also had the greatest effect for me. If you don't share your main email with sketchy reselling parties, it remains surprising clean. And this on a 10 year old+ account.
  - kjaftaedi 5y ago
    I think it's the difference between people that unsubscribe from lists and those that don't. If you're a regular unsubscriber, your email box is only ever filled with relevant important items. I do the same thing with my phone notifications. If my phone ever gets a notification, it's something that directly concerns me. I don't know how people live getting bombarded with stuff all day, but like you said, everyone's different.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  I get quite a bit of emails that are not completely spam, but by no means urgent to see. The filtering has been great to let me focus on things I need to see immediately, without having to scroll through 50 different promotional things

znpy 5y ago

If you didn't realize it, Google has managed to get you to waster your time actually going through advertising (instead of putting that on the side for you). I'm really surprised most people aren't realizing this.

chabad360 5y ago
Huh. I thought it had something to do with my subscription to oss-security (the plain-text email causing some confusion in the filters). But clearly it's not just me...

uclastudent1000 5y ago

Just made an account to let you know that this specific comment made me check my Promotions tab, which happened to contain… an invitation to schedule a software engineering interview. Would definitely have missed that if I didn’t get bored and read this HN thread midway through my lecture.

chungus 5y ago
go bruins
dripton 5y ago
Life pro tip: most recruiters can't write emails that look like they came from humans rather than spambots. If you're actively looking for a job, check all your spam folders daily. I can't tell you how many actual job leads have ended up in mine.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Also, recruiters sends large numbers of similar emails so they look like a spammer to the filters. Then if people who get them just mark them a spam rather than deleting or responding, the problem is compounded.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Depending on your definition of spam, the recruiters might actually be sending spam. I once had a recruiter try to hire me for the company I was already working at and had clearly indicated on my Linkedin...
  - Piskvorrr 5y ago
    People who get them might not have opted into them. That is spam, by definition. Elephant in the room of "foot-in-the-door marketing"? I guess.
- abraae 5y ago
  Many recruiters are sending their emails from a system, not writing them by hand. They look they came from a template, because they did. Add to that that when that recruitment system was implemented, the recruiter probably didn't bother updating/customizing the default templates, making their emails just the same as everyone else's.

zz865 5y ago

Its actually worth going through and unsubscribing to those promo emails just to make this easier.

ksaj 5y ago

This is an unusual problem that I also witness over and over again. The unusual part is that I'll get same-source emails (eg: mailing lists that I follow) scattered between two different tabs, so it is like Google only forgets where they go sometimes. I drag them to the proper tab each time, but it doesn't seem to fix anything.

kazinator 5y ago

This HN submission is getting spam from gmail accounts, not to your gmail account.

chj 5y ago

This also happened to me. A very important email was put under the promotions. Usually I just kept the gmail tab open and didn't check my phone. Fortunately for me, I noticed this mail on my phone when I was clearing the unread status. At the same time, all sorts of ads fall into my inbox repeatedly, even I deliberately mark them as spam or junk. ( Being cautious, I just checked the promotions again. And there is another important email lying. WTF!)

nikau 5y ago

The only reliable low maintenance solution is to get your own domain with a catch all mail service. Then for every email interaction with a 3rd party you make a unique address like amazondotcom3823@yourdomain.com. You can then just add rules for each incoming mail domain to send them to a junk folder, especially if it was was a one time transaction and subsequent emails are just going to be marketing junk. It also lets you know who has had their mailing lists compromised as there is virtually zero chance someone would guess the email address like the example above.

dahart 5y ago
> Then for every email interaction with a 3rd party you make a unique address Does that work for you? Have you caught many companies sharing your address? I’ve been making unique addresses for a decade, and it has been a complete failure. I haven’t caught any companies sharing them, and it hasn’t stopped spam in the slightest. I’m not sure where spammers get my mail email address from, but they do, and so far I’m not seeing them get the individualized addresses, like ever.
- nikau 5y ago
  Yep I've noticed a few, most of the breaches were disclosed to the public which is good. I've stopped using those services so I've just send them straight to trash now as they get non stop spam. Before setting up a catch all domain I had 3 distinct email addresses I used as high/medium/low priority which helped, but its much simpler with the catch all domain as it goes into the same inbox, just with different "To:" addresses that you can easily filter on - I just right click in outlook and select move all mail to recipient to junk. To be fair most of the mail I get is marketing and I could probably unsubscribe, its just easier to make a rule to filter them to junk.
  - 13of40 5y ago
    I actually have a rule in my work email that tosses everything that contains the word "unsubscribe" and where I am the sole recipient. Hasn't done me wrong for years, as far as I know.

atregir 5y ago

I could have written this. The exact same thing happens to me and now I am realizing you might be right and it might be on purpose so we scroll through all the unnecessary ads. Arrgh.

markogresak 5y ago

You can disable the grouping feature. What I did to reduce the noise in my mailbox is to unsubscribe from all marketing emails, and I move the ones that still come through to spam folder. It was a bit tedious at first, but now gmail is doing a pretty good job at automatically filtering out senders that do not respect my request to unsubscribe.

samstave 5y ago

There is no way to sort in gmail satisfactorily that I know? Like sort by subject, sender, etc... I can search, but I cant SORT. Am I missing something obvious?