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GMail is deteriorating. I loathe the new 'reduced' inline reply UI. Half the time I am searching for how to reveal the sender address or subject field because I

GMail is deteriorating. I loathe the new 'reduced' inline reply UI. Half the time I am searching for how to reveal the sender address or subject field because I need to change them, but GMail seems to think this is an edge use case. Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.

jeffgreco 13y ago
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186534 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186534
jmartini 13y ago
you can uncheck the other tabbed inboxes under "Configure Inbox" and everything will remain in the primary email. Seems to work for now...
cheald 13y ago
1. Click the arrow next to the "To". It'll give you the options for changing who it's sent to, or editing the subject. In the popup composition interface, clicking the word "To" gives you a nice recipient list editor. 2. Click the arrow next to the Inbox label. Select your preferred inbox type. http://cl.ly/image/1Z2M0c1z3T1B http://cl.ly/image/1Z2M0c1z3T1B
vorporeal 13y ago
Social and Promotions should basically just contain the "unimportant crap". If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake. Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc). Disclaimer: I'm a Gmail engineer.
- beambot 13y ago
  Why have tabs when there's already priority inbox, labels, and filters? It seems like the new feature is essentially just a way to do automatic (learned?) labeling -- yet it won't let you build your own tabs using already-defined custom labels. :-/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- beefman 13y ago
  > and Gmail should learn from its mistake Do you mean "Policy is against giving users any meaningful ability to train their filters, but if Neptune is in the Third House, Gmail might learn from its mistake"?
- justin66 13y ago
  > If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake. The mistake is making me worry about this shit in the first place. > Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc). Thank you.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  When I receive "unimportant crap," I either unsubscribe to the list that sent it, or mark it as spam. I do not leave crap lying around and then add another management dimension to my Inbox to deal with it.
  - saundby 13y ago
    I wish I could give you more than one upvote. Perhaps even a googol of them.
  - batiudrami 13y ago
w33ble 13y ago
I got that the other day. I was kind of excited, until I started using it. I recently started to play the inbox-zero game, and now I have 3 inboxes to sort through, and make sure things were being categorized correctly. Pretty painful. Like all the others have pointed out, you can (thankfully!) turn it off.
bobbles 13y ago
Half the time I think GMail is being unresponsive it turns out its just put the cursor on the screen somewhere ready for text and has given me no indication I need to look on the opposite corner of the screen from where I clicked 'reply'
- jol 13y ago
  Compose is even worse... What I especially hate about it is that I expext no clutter around when composing new message, they just screwed up this for me totally. (Ok, I bet they can make it worse)
emp_ 13y ago
My serious issue with it was forwarding my CV after typing a very personalized message (I send a CV every couple months or so to the rare job post that catches my eye) and when I sent it today, BAM! Forgot to change the hidden subject. I am john's lack of interface.
Justsignedup 13y ago
I've honestly been appreciating Gmail more and more. I find their interface to be innovative and quickly becoming more and more streamlined and minimalistic. I love the new editing. RARELY do I need complex formatting, so their features solve my 90% needs well and sure I hit a bit of frustration 10% of the time when I need a feature i haven't used before. With recent innovations I have less and less reason to use dedicated desktop apps. I honestly love every aspect of gmail. The worst ATM is that desktop clients don't support the multiple inboxes that gmail introduced, so most clients think i have a ton of unread messages. So i wish google would come out with some desktop clients with multiple account support. Edit: I usually see my email appear in my android app before I even see it in the desktop.
thejosh 13y ago
Tabbed inbox is terrible. Click the gear icon on the right, then click 'Configure Inbox' Untick every checkbox but Primary, then click Save. It's now saner.
- Simucal 13y ago
  I realize this is subjective, but I personally love the tabbed inbox. Having all the "promotional" emails I get sent moved to a separate tab where I only have to look at them when I want to has completely tamed my inbox. My primary tab now only has messages that I care about. I only wish it was implemented in a way that all clients could utilize it. I personally don't use the Gmail iOS client because I have several work inboxes that I want unified with my personal email.
  - ericd 13y ago
    Eh, that's what priority inbox vs. non is for for me, and that works in the GMail Android app, at least.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    That's what Filters and Labels are for.
    - csallen 13y ago
      Exactly. It astonishes me how few people make use of filters and labels.
      - lloeki 13y ago
        Rewind to 10 years ago. - "Hey I'm most in a sea of spam!" - "That's what rules and folders are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to weed out spam from their inbox" Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (SPAM|NOT SPAM). The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of combating spam went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again. Fast forward to present time - "Hey, now that the problem of spam is solved, email is useful again. So useful in fact that I'm now lost in a sea of emails!" - "That's what filters and labels are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to classify email" Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (X|NOT X), for interesting values of X. The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of classifying email went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.
jiggy2011 13y ago
I don't understand the logic behind the new tiny compose window, it looks like something from an IM program. If I'm composing an email surely the most important thing is the thing I am composing, so why give it 1/4 of the screen space? The second most important thing is the email I am replying to, but the compose window pops up over the top of that obscuring a chunk of it.
- alttab 13y ago
  Whats even more confusing, is when I double-click on users I used to use to g-chat to, it pulls up the message and I end up e-mailing them instead of messaging them. This is easier to do now that the e-mail window looks like a chat window. I've noticed others doing this as well. They e-mail me without a subject and its context is from a recent chat.
  - airtonix 13y ago
    that's because they're offline. if they were online then you'd get the chat message dialogs. makes left sense to me.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  I think the logic is that you can search through email for things while composing. e.g. I'm composing an email and referring to something in another email I got a few days ago. I can search for that email, read it, and then get back to composing. Perviously I would have had to save the email I was composing as a draft, find my other email, then go back and open the draft.
  - pmjordan 13y ago
    With the "old" compose UI, you can/could click the box-with-arrow button to transition into a new browser tab or window. Solves the same problem without trying to re-invent windows in HTML. I'm guessing this didn't work (well) on Chrome OS or something?
- pasbesoin 13y ago
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Yes, it is nearly unusable for me now and it is getting worse. I've thought a lot about it and I believe the problem is related to the requirement of getting new users. Back when Gmail was 'new' it had to be like Eudora or another standalone mail program (or Netscape Communicator if you remember that far back) in order to convert people. It did a good job, but 'new' people, people who have never used a standalone email client think it is 'clunky' and 'ugly.' To get those people it had to be more like IM or facebook A big square to type in, and then trying desperately to pick the right person to send to. Things we oldsters did all the time like maintain multiple email identities was 'cruft', people who called each other 'bro' and 'totalph33r' were the target demographic for the 'new' users. And to some extent all those people who really don't know of what email really is but they use it anyway. Computer users, which is to say people who use computation devices for arbitrary tasks, and invent new uses on the fly, are not the majority demographic anymore. We are a 'specialty group.'
- eurleif 13y ago
  For what it's worth, my mother -- who is not at all good with computers -- was upset about the new Gmail compose UI too.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    Excellent, you've made my day. Perhaps they will pull back from the brink.
- airtonix 13y ago
  eh? change it in the settings. settings/inbox/type
- rachelbythebay 13y ago
  You'd think they'd put together another team and make a separate frontend. I mean, surely they can build two web interfaces to the same backend storage servers, right? They should have plenty of programmers to throw at the problem. The fact this hasn't happened probably says a lot about the situation, both technically and politically.
_pmf_ 13y ago
Having to use the new Google Groups, I'm really, really glad I never went the GMail way. Seriously, the Groups interface is an abomination. "Post" at the top? Really? I had to look for about 30 seconds to find the button when switching from the clear old Google Groups interface to the new mess. "Ma, look! We're native mobile! Ma! MA! Look! Mobile! Ma!"
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  You had to look for 30 seconds to find the giant, red, all-caps, "NEW TOPIC" button?
airtonix 13y ago
actually you can change it. settings / inbox / type
bad_user 13y ago
Personally I like the inline reply UI and the new compose window. I actually like every change that they did, including the new tabbed Inbox.
smegel 13y ago
I really wonder about google product development sometimes. Its like it really is done by interns with "bright ideas" but not much common sense.
lsc 13y ago
I wonder how long it will take for people to realize that putting something as important as mail on a UI they don't control is a bad idea? How long after that before google disables IMAP access to gmail? hm. maybe I should start offering (paid) IMAP mail service again.
- aneth4 13y ago
  Are you suggesting everyone write their own email client?
  - lsc 13y ago
    You see, back when web applications were hopelessly inferior to native applications, we would use a mail client that ran locally on our computer to read email. We could use that same program to check mail across many different email providers... so if we wanted to change email providers, well, we could do that without changing our UI. These mail clients used standards like pop3 or IMAP to communicate with the mail server. with IMAP, you can check email from multiple devices/computers just as easily as you can with gmail (though, for some reason, most users were confused by IMAP; pop3 was popular long after IMAP was universally available. using pop3 from multiple computers is a huge pain.) (Of course, this was back before everyone and their dog had their own domain name, so switching email providers was still a huge pain in the ass.) My suggestion is that everyone pick an IMAP client to handle their email, then switch between providers as-needed.
    - aneth4 13y ago
      You still don't have control over the UI.... What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP? What makes you think another provider is not going to stop supporting IMAP, or stop existing at all? What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
      - lsc 13y ago
        >You still don't have control over the UI.... Well, you get to choose your mail client independently of your mail provider. >What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP I have no solid evidence, of course, but the fact that they've disabled xmmp support on gtalk, to me points at a google attempting to become more of an apple or facebook-style 'walled garden' (and all along, well, google makes money off showing you ads; if you check mail via IMAP, you aren't reading those ads) >What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain? If you are using IMAP to check your mail, and have your own domain, this isn't hard at all. My view is that being a mass market IMAP provider wouldn't make all that much sense unless google did turn off IMAP, or unless google otherwise started screwing things up (things, I mean, besides the UI) However... it's easier to do something if you've been doing it for a while, you know? I haven't seriously sysadmin'd a mailserver for anything but my own company in... almost a decade now. It would take me some time to get up to speed. So yes, if I want to be in a position to swoop in if google disables IMAP, I should probably start now.
Toshio 13y ago
> "There is apparently no way to turn it off, either." Yes, there is, if you are willing to live a Spartan e-mail lifestyle, like I do. Simply go to: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ I never really liked their new-fangled interface they came up with a few years ago, and they said they wouldn't deprecate the old one, so I kept using it.
rca 13y ago
In the 'configure inbox' panel you can disable tabs you don't care for. If you only keep 'primary', it's pretty much turned off. Now google might force it on you sometime in the future, but I don't really see what would be the point... However I think it would be nice to be able to create custom tabs and associate filters/label to them. I really could see myself putting various mailing list to their own tabs.

jeffgreco 13y ago

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186534 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/186534

jmartini 13y ago

you can uncheck the other tabbed inboxes under "Configure Inbox" and everything will remain in the primary email. Seems to work for now...

cheald 13y ago

1. Click the arrow next to the "To". It'll give you the options for changing who it's sent to, or editing the subject. In the popup composition interface, clicking the word "To" gives you a nice recipient list editor. 2. Click the arrow next to the Inbox label. Select your preferred inbox type. http://cl.ly/image/1Z2M0c1z3T1B http://cl.ly/image/1Z2M0c1z3T1B

vorporeal 13y ago

Social and Promotions should basically just contain the "unimportant crap". If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake. Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc). Disclaimer: I'm a Gmail engineer.

beambot 13y ago
Why have tabs when there's already priority inbox, labels, and filters? It seems like the new feature is essentially just a way to do automatic (learned?) labeling -- yet it won't let you build your own tabs using already-defined custom labels. :-/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
beefman 13y ago
> and Gmail should learn from its mistake Do you mean "Policy is against giving users any meaningful ability to train their filters, but if Neptune is in the Third House, Gmail might learn from its mistake"?
justin66 13y ago
> If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake. The mistake is making me worry about this shit in the first place. > Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc). Thank you.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
auctiontheory 13y ago
When I receive "unimportant crap," I either unsubscribe to the list that sent it, or mark it as spam. I do not leave crap lying around and then add another management dimension to my Inbox to deal with it.
- saundby 13y ago
  I wish I could give you more than one upvote. Perhaps even a googol of them.
- batiudrami 13y ago

w33ble 13y ago

I got that the other day. I was kind of excited, until I started using it. I recently started to play the inbox-zero game, and now I have 3 inboxes to sort through, and make sure things were being categorized correctly. Pretty painful. Like all the others have pointed out, you can (thankfully!) turn it off.

bobbles 13y ago

Half the time I think GMail is being unresponsive it turns out its just put the cursor on the screen somewhere ready for text and has given me no indication I need to look on the opposite corner of the screen from where I clicked 'reply'

jol 13y ago
Compose is even worse... What I especially hate about it is that I expext no clutter around when composing new message, they just screwed up this for me totally. (Ok, I bet they can make it worse)

emp_ 13y ago

My serious issue with it was forwarding my CV after typing a very personalized message (I send a CV every couple months or so to the rare job post that catches my eye) and when I sent it today, BAM! Forgot to change the hidden subject. I am john's lack of interface.

Justsignedup 13y ago

I've honestly been appreciating Gmail more and more. I find their interface to be innovative and quickly becoming more and more streamlined and minimalistic. I love the new editing. RARELY do I need complex formatting, so their features solve my 90% needs well and sure I hit a bit of frustration 10% of the time when I need a feature i haven't used before. With recent innovations I have less and less reason to use dedicated desktop apps. I honestly love every aspect of gmail. The worst ATM is that desktop clients don't support the multiple inboxes that gmail introduced, so most clients think i have a ton of unread messages. So i wish google would come out with some desktop clients with multiple account support. Edit: I usually see my email appear in my android app before I even see it in the desktop.

thejosh 13y ago

Tabbed inbox is terrible. Click the gear icon on the right, then click 'Configure Inbox' Untick every checkbox but Primary, then click Save. It's now saner.

Simucal 13y ago
I realize this is subjective, but I personally love the tabbed inbox. Having all the "promotional" emails I get sent moved to a separate tab where I only have to look at them when I want to has completely tamed my inbox. My primary tab now only has messages that I care about. I only wish it was implemented in a way that all clients could utilize it. I personally don't use the Gmail iOS client because I have several work inboxes that I want unified with my personal email.
- ericd 13y ago
  Eh, that's what priority inbox vs. non is for for me, and that works in the GMail Android app, at least.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  That's what Filters and Labels are for.
  - csallen 13y ago
    Exactly. It astonishes me how few people make use of filters and labels.
    - lloeki 13y ago
      Rewind to 10 years ago. - "Hey I'm most in a sea of spam!" - "That's what rules and folders are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to weed out spam from their inbox" Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (SPAM|NOT SPAM). The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of combating spam went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again. Fast forward to present time - "Hey, now that the problem of spam is solved, email is useful again. So useful in fact that I'm now lost in a sea of emails!" - "That's what filters and labels are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to classify email" Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (X|NOT X), for interesting values of X. The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of classifying email went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.

jiggy2011 13y ago

I don't understand the logic behind the new tiny compose window, it looks like something from an IM program. If I'm composing an email surely the most important thing is the thing I am composing, so why give it 1/4 of the screen space? The second most important thing is the email I am replying to, but the compose window pops up over the top of that obscuring a chunk of it.

alttab 13y ago
Whats even more confusing, is when I double-click on users I used to use to g-chat to, it pulls up the message and I end up e-mailing them instead of messaging them. This is easier to do now that the e-mail window looks like a chat window. I've noticed others doing this as well. They e-mail me without a subject and its context is from a recent chat.
- airtonix 13y ago
  that's because they're offline. if they were online then you'd get the chat message dialogs. makes left sense to me.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
I think the logic is that you can search through email for things while composing. e.g. I'm composing an email and referring to something in another email I got a few days ago. I can search for that email, read it, and then get back to composing. Perviously I would have had to save the email I was composing as a draft, find my other email, then go back and open the draft.
- pmjordan 13y ago
  With the "old" compose UI, you can/could click the box-with-arrow button to transition into a new browser tab or window. Solves the same problem without trying to re-invent windows in HTML. I'm guessing this didn't work (well) on Chrome OS or something?
pasbesoin 13y ago

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Yes, it is nearly unusable for me now and it is getting worse. I've thought a lot about it and I believe the problem is related to the requirement of getting new users. Back when Gmail was 'new' it had to be like Eudora or another standalone mail program (or Netscape Communicator if you remember that far back) in order to convert people. It did a good job, but 'new' people, people who have never used a standalone email client think it is 'clunky' and 'ugly.' To get those people it had to be more like IM or facebook A big square to type in, and then trying desperately to pick the right person to send to. Things we oldsters did all the time like maintain multiple email identities was 'cruft', people who called each other 'bro' and 'totalph33r' were the target demographic for the 'new' users. And to some extent all those people who really don't know of what email really is but they use it anyway. Computer users, which is to say people who use computation devices for arbitrary tasks, and invent new uses on the fly, are not the majority demographic anymore. We are a 'specialty group.'

eurleif 13y ago
For what it's worth, my mother -- who is not at all good with computers -- was upset about the new Gmail compose UI too.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Excellent, you've made my day. Perhaps they will pull back from the brink.
airtonix 13y ago
eh? change it in the settings. settings/inbox/type
rachelbythebay 13y ago
You'd think they'd put together another team and make a separate frontend. I mean, surely they can build two web interfaces to the same backend storage servers, right? They should have plenty of programmers to throw at the problem. The fact this hasn't happened probably says a lot about the situation, both technically and politically.

_pmf_ 13y ago

Having to use the new Google Groups, I'm really, really glad I never went the GMail way. Seriously, the Groups interface is an abomination. "Post" at the top? Really? I had to look for about 30 seconds to find the button when switching from the clear old Google Groups interface to the new mess. "Ma, look! We're native mobile! Ma! MA! Look! Mobile! Ma!"

VikingCoder 13y ago
You had to look for 30 seconds to find the giant, red, all-caps, "NEW TOPIC" button?

airtonix 13y ago

actually you can change it. settings / inbox / type

bad_user 13y ago

Personally I like the inline reply UI and the new compose window. I actually like every change that they did, including the new tabbed Inbox.

smegel 13y ago

I really wonder about google product development sometimes. Its like it really is done by interns with "bright ideas" but not much common sense.

lsc 13y ago

I wonder how long it will take for people to realize that putting something as important as mail on a UI they don't control is a bad idea? How long after that before google disables IMAP access to gmail? hm. maybe I should start offering (paid) IMAP mail service again.

aneth4 13y ago
Are you suggesting everyone write their own email client?
- lsc 13y ago
  You see, back when web applications were hopelessly inferior to native applications, we would use a mail client that ran locally on our computer to read email. We could use that same program to check mail across many different email providers... so if we wanted to change email providers, well, we could do that without changing our UI. These mail clients used standards like pop3 or IMAP to communicate with the mail server. with IMAP, you can check email from multiple devices/computers just as easily as you can with gmail (though, for some reason, most users were confused by IMAP; pop3 was popular long after IMAP was universally available. using pop3 from multiple computers is a huge pain.) (Of course, this was back before everyone and their dog had their own domain name, so switching email providers was still a huge pain in the ass.) My suggestion is that everyone pick an IMAP client to handle their email, then switch between providers as-needed.
  - aneth4 13y ago
    You still don't have control over the UI.... What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP? What makes you think another provider is not going to stop supporting IMAP, or stop existing at all? What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
    - lsc 13y ago
      >You still don't have control over the UI.... Well, you get to choose your mail client independently of your mail provider. >What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP I have no solid evidence, of course, but the fact that they've disabled xmmp support on gtalk, to me points at a google attempting to become more of an apple or facebook-style 'walled garden' (and all along, well, google makes money off showing you ads; if you check mail via IMAP, you aren't reading those ads) >What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain? If you are using IMAP to check your mail, and have your own domain, this isn't hard at all. My view is that being a mass market IMAP provider wouldn't make all that much sense unless google did turn off IMAP, or unless google otherwise started screwing things up (things, I mean, besides the UI) However... it's easier to do something if you've been doing it for a while, you know? I haven't seriously sysadmin'd a mailserver for anything but my own company in... almost a decade now. It would take me some time to get up to speed. So yes, if I want to be in a position to swoop in if google disables IMAP, I should probably start now.

Toshio 13y ago

> "There is apparently no way to turn it off, either." Yes, there is, if you are willing to live a Spartan e-mail lifestyle, like I do. Simply go to: https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ I never really liked their new-fangled interface they came up with a few years ago, and they said they wouldn't deprecate the old one, so I kept using it.

rca 13y ago

In the 'configure inbox' panel you can disable tabs you don't care for. If you only keep 'primary', it's pretty much turned off. Now google might force it on you sometime in the future, but I don't really see what would be the point... However I think it would be nice to be able to create custom tabs and associate filters/label to them. I really could see myself putting various mailing list to their own tabs.