11 ms·
Gmail is showing ads in the middle of the inbox
- tucosan 3y agoI find it weird that people on HN complain about ads in Gmail. If you're not paying for a service, someone else has to cover the costs you generate by using the service. A Google Workspace subscription is not expensive. You can run it behind your own TLD, and you won't see any ads.
- microflash 3y agoLast time I used Gmail app, it was showing multiple ads on the top. Now, it seems we are getting even more ads scattered throughout (since a few on the top were clearly not enough). With this pace, that day is not far when people will be complaining about not being able to find mails in their Gmail inbox. Thankfully, this misery can be easily avoided by using alternatives such as K9 and FairEmail.
- esotericimpl 3y agoSame idea as here: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ Gmail is being Enshittified.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoHonestly, it's amazing how quickly Google got to the point where their corporate culture is so ossified that they can't build or maintain anything successful anymore and are resorting to extracting the tiniest bits of revenue no matter the reputational cost. Especially considering that this decline has been going on for a while. Most big successful companies blow up and then spend decades on a plateau before they start the long, inevitable decline - it seems like Google just skipped that part.
- coldpie 3y agoI'm always baffled when I see people using a desktop web browser without an ad blocker. We have the technology to fix this, folks! It takes like two clicks! Use it! https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoAdblocking is one of the primary reasons I will always use the mobile site over the app. Why cede over navigation controls and privacy to an app when I can keep it all sandboxed in a familiar and (adblocked) place?
- CoastalCoder 3y agoAny suggestions for ad blocking on mobile? I've been using Chrome on Android, which is pretty much the experience you'd imagine (both pros and cons).
- xur17 3y agoBrave, hands down.
- coldpie 3y agouBlock Origin works great in Firefox for Android.
- jacooper 3y agoBrave or Firefox with ublock origin
- capableweb 3y ago> Any suggestions for ad blocking on mobile? Firefox on Android supports extensions last time I used Android, and uBlock Origin works on mobile.
- CaptainZapp 3y agoI concur. Can't remember when I've last seen an add on mobile and I use exactly that. Firefox with uBlock Origin on a cheap ass Motorola phone with not very much memory.
- burkaman 3y agoI use https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/. Blocks ads in most apps, not just browsers.
- soared 3y ago[flagged]
- rideontime 3y agoSorry, non-native english speaker here: what does “wriled” mean? My “Google-Fu” is failing me.
- kardos 3y agoLooks like a typo for 'riled'
- mikestew 3y agoriled: informal make (someone) annoyed or irritated
- jurassicfoxy 3y agohttps://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/all-riled-up https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/all-riled-up
- rgoulter 3y ago> My “Google-Fu” is failing me. FWIW, I tried asking a chat LLM, ("explain the word '<blah>' in '<sentence>'") and it was able to catch it. That's another tool to consider. Seems good for misspellings and slang. (e.g. ChatGPT was able to help me with "Explain the Vietnamese slang "ieu" used in sms messages").
- magoghm 3y agoI have been using Gmail since 2004 and I haven't ever seen a single ad there. Edit: I just checked and it seems that the ad blocker might be blocking them. What's interesting is that I did not install that ad blocker myself, and I'm using Chrome. Does Chrome come by default with an ad blocker that blocks the ads in Gmail?
- jeffbee 3y agoYou won't see them if you disable the tabbed inbox, which I recommend anyway because the classification of threads into tabs is surprising and inconsistent.
- 0zemp2c 3y ago...and adds no value even when it works, just adds one more step
- jeffbee 3y agoIndeed. I never understood the point of it. It made sense in Inbox because Inbox would only show you the Promotions bundle once per day (or at your preferred frequency) but after they shoved the feature into Gmail it stopped making any sense.
- account42 3y agoI think it makes sens for people who get themselves signed up for all kinds of newsletters they don't really want and then can't find anything in their inbox. So really it's just another anti-spam filter and comes with the same downsides.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoYes, I've always been baffled by this. I like the idea of it, but when you actually use it and think about it, it actually makes the experience worse.
- zeven7 3y ago
- rc_mob 3y agoDamn. I do not want to migrate off gmail, but this is going to force me.
- k__ 3y agoI switched to Proton two years ago and I'm pretty happy. It helped to get a custom domain before the switch. That way, I could stay on Gmail while switching all accounts to my new domain and later just transfer the domain from Gmail to Proton.
- rkachowski 3y agoThe only thing stopping me from full proton is the clunky calendar integration. The last time I checked there was no way to get calendar support on android / ios / macos like with gcal. There's a custom calendar app but it lacks the usability of an iCal integration
- k__ 3y agoYes, I still use Google calendar.
- r3trohack3r 3y agoI did the inverse. I migrated to protonmail and setup email forwarding from GMail to proton. Then, every time I received an email that was forwarded, I’d go in and update that vendor or unsubscribe. After a few months, the only thing still coming from GMail was spam and I shut off the forwarder. Basically a classic strangulation strategy used by service migrations. I did setup a private domain, but just for configuring a catch-all. Now each vendor gets their own email address. Originally did it to cut down on spam and track where it was coming from. But it turns out my personal email doesn’t get much spam. My gmail accounts get hammered with it. Seems like gmail has a unique spam problem.
- k__ 3y agoAlso a good idea!
- bthrn 3y agoAs annoying as this is, I was mildly amused at the irony that this article itself has ads shoved between paragraphs.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWell, one is a blog/news site, the other is an email client. That's pretty different.
- isanjay 3y agoOne needs terabytes of storage and hundreds of servers and other other needs few megabytes of storage and relatively miniscule server.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIt's kinda weird. I remember switching to gmail because it had working spam blocking. It was basically all emails. Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement. Advertisement from google, and various form of spam emails, mostly in the form of newsletters I've never signed up for. Meanwhile my off-gmail inbox, an email address I have literally in my hacker news profile info as well as printed in plain text on my website, doesn't get a fraction of the spam.
- 1over137 3y ago>Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement. It's almost as if Google is an advertisements company. :)
- hammyhavoc 3y agoIMO, it's a scaling issue. Filtering email is relatively expensive, it's cheaper to just let a good chunk of it through, especially if the service isn't necessarily making tons of money with every user given how many people block ads by default.
- vxNsr 3y agoThe next step is for gmail to disable other clients to force you to use theirs so you can’t get away from the ads.
- jeffbee 3y ago"I went to the Promotions tab and saw ads" is a hell of a take.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- passwordoops 3y agoThat's not what the article is saying at all. They mention Promotions always had ads (expected), but now they're showing up in Updates, and in the middle of the list to boot, which never had ads before. In fact, the main usefulness of the Tabs for me has always been the filtering of crap to Promotions and no ads in the other tabs
- nottorp 3y agoSo when are they disabling 3rd party IMAP clients? In the name of security of course!
- fsflover 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300008
- everybodyknows 3y ago2019.
- nottorp 3y ago<looks at his apple mail showing google> Seems to still work here...
- zac23or 3y agoI don't understand this kind of rant. Google's revenue comes from ads. Google will place ads on all products wherever possible. If Google doesn't put it up, the shareholders will ask to put it up. Oh, the article has too many ads.
- trabant00 3y agoBasic Fastmail is 3$/month. My com domain is ~12$/year. That's 50$/year for one of, if not the most important internet service tied to your identity. Sorry to put it this bluntly but pay up or shut up and take it. Or do the work and host it yourself. Or make friends with some IT people and have them host it as a favor. Or whatever. You are not entitled to both free and good services. Google has to make money, what a surprise. Whenever there's talk about privacy, support, ads, etc about a product or service here everybody's saying that they would pay for the clean thing. Well for email you absolutely can.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoName an Android email client that doesn't have ads, isn't hot garbage in UI or UX, and has features like email templates.
- LopovJack 3y agoFairmail and K9.
- trabant00 3y agoFastmail does not have ads, has good ui and ux. I don't even know what email templates are. But name a HN user that is smarter than me, his name begins with trab and ends in nt00.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoEmail templates are canned responses. E.g., if you get many emails asking about x, give them the boilerplate response in a couple taps from your phone.
- vgeek 3y agoFairEmail is probably the best. K9 is more hit or miss, but is usable.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
- zoul 3y agoI have migrated to https://www.fastmail.com/ https://www.fastmail.com/, it was quite painless. Happy to pay for it, happy to have email on my own domain. Can recommend. (No affiliation, just a happy user.)
- SuperCuber 3y agoanother enthusiastic +1 comment here. Moved to them from gmail, set up *@firstnamelastname.com and the ability to send and receive emails from my old gmail, then moved all my accounts over (pretty easy if you have a password manager) Works amazingly :)
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis might be the endorsement that finally gets me to move to fm
- 0zemp2c 3y ago....and you can forward your gmail to your fastmail account, and have fastmail respond using the right address
- tledakis 3y agoanother happy user here for many years. It is worth it
- rcme 3y agoDoes their iOS app work well?
- mthoms 3y agoIt's great IMO.
- mthoms 3y agoDitto here. Fastmail is worth every penny. The product is better and they actually have support.
- dogleash 3y ago
- mhb 3y agoSo, free service needs way to pay for infrastructure to provide service? Knock me over with a feather.
- karaterobot 3y agoThat doesn't quite explain it for me. Recall that they haven't shown these ads for the last 19 years. They were certainly analyzing your data and using that information the whole time, likely to improve their ads business. But until recently, that was enough, and now it's not. That is what is interesting.
- pavlov 3y agoGmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost. When it launched in 2004, Google was reading all your emails so they could target ads. This was entirely public knowledge and there was debate about whether it’s a good idea to give a tech company that kind of access, but hey, they promised to Do No Evil and had a colorful logo so it was all fine. They finally stopped the practice 13 years later [1], but it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gmail’s product design is driven by the needs of ad display and data collection. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/4041720/heres-why-it-took-gmail-13-years-to-stop-scanning-your-email-to-target-ads https://www.fastcompany.com/4041720/heres-why-it-took-gmail-...
- jeffbee 3y ago> Gmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost. I don't think that's really true. The original point of gmail was to get users to log in, so they would get better search quality. Before gmail there was no reason to log in to Google at all.
- pavlov 3y agoIs the point of getting users to log in to give them better search results or better targeted ads? My impression is that the two have always gone hand in hand at Google.
- chankstein38 3y agoI know this isn't necessarily relevant but as an old person when I saw your >2004 and then >13 years later my brain laughed like "ahaha no way it's been 13+ years since 2004" Nope. Brain. Sorry. It's been 19 :( lol
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoI really hope this trend doesn’t end with ads in my text messages too. It’s sad to see an email service that partly became popular because they had such a great spam filter, now injecting spam.
- planede 3y agoUh, so for how long can I keep accessing my inbox through IMAP?
- bedast 3y agoI'm frequently reminding people that Google is not an email provider nor a search engine nor really anything else it pretends to be, but that it's a data harvesting and ad company. Thankfully I've been becoming less reliant on my gmail inbox. But also, it appears my various efforts for blocking malicious content may be blocking these ads because I don't see them on my home network.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWhat are you relying on in place of Gmail? It's never been the email service itself I've liked, it's the web app and Android app, I use the External Accounts feature to drag in all email accounts into one place.
- bedast 3y agoI have my own domain attached to icloud mail at the moment. But primarily, I have my own domain and can move it to wherever I need it. Icloud mail isn't the best thing in the world, still, but it's more cost efficient than trying to run it on a personal O365 or some other service for now. I don't really have need for the enhanced security/privacy of some of the other providers available, at least for now, but having my own domain means migrating to them later, should I need it, shouldn't be difficult. I will note the icloud mail web interface is utter garbage.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoThis is making me want to switch to Nextcloud Mail's web app. I wish there was a companion Android app to go with it.
- ir77 3y agogmail discouraged me from using it a few years back when they insisted on scanning my emails for "purchases" and then would log these items somewhere in my history graph. interestingly enough, you could delete almost all history but the purchase history. what especially rubbed me the wrong way that it would list some medicine on there, and even though i didn't even purchase it through google they insisted on keeping that record in there permanently at their discretion. i immediately moved over all 10+ of history to a new provider, set up an OOO and an auto forward to the new email. all "real" people would read the OOO and write to the new email, so now whatever's in gmail is a bot infested ad stuff.
- diimdeep 3y agoI recommend to use Mimestream app https://mimestream.com https://mimestream.com for gmail, until you can migrate off gmail and Google
- JohnFen 3y agoI would be willing to tolerate ads if I could be sure they didn't come with tracking.
- minusf 3y agodo ads pay just by looking at them? one needs to click on them and generate at least a lead if not a conversion, no? --an adblock user since adblocking is a thing and bandcamp/patreon user
- xnx 3y agoYes. Many ads are cost per impression.
- endigma 3y agoWow! Google saves me so much time. I don't even have to subscribe myself to junkmail lists anymore!
- fjni 3y agoIf you're ok with html-only, enjoy a throwback: https://mail.google.com/mail?ui=html https://mail.google.com/mail?ui=html I'm not sure the ads would be in that UI.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoIt used to be clearly separated what ads were and what not. On Outlook they show up as an email. On top. Same with Reddit. The advertisements keep on becoming less and less obvious. DuckDuckGo on my iPhone has a FULL page of advertisements when I click 'Products'. And they look exactly the same. There's only a header. Advertisements should be extremely explicitly marked.
- account42 3y agoAgreed, the advertising industry has been tring to skirt around consumer protection laws and is long due a hard slap through their face.
- sammyo 3y agoThrow'm a bone. Click on gmail ads, keep gmail alive as long as possible. Yes issues, yes privacy, yes a lot, but gmail is one of the best things on the internet. So good at spam, especially the real nasties. Worth a few clicks.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoThunderbird. K9. Come on.