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Gmail Overhaul Has Marketers Saying 'Ack'
- dcminter 13y agoI disabled the promotions tab rather rapidly - it was capturing ticket bookings and other emails that are of immediate importance to me. Were it to work correctly I don't think it would be causing problems for the typical user and I'm not very sympathetic to the interests of marketers when considering how my inbox should be presented to me.
- epoxyhockey 13y agoSame here. Pretty much anything sent via AWeber went into promotions, though I don't consider many newsletters to be a promotion. It seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions (does no one unsubscribe anymore?). All I really know is that I am not the target audience for the feature.
- corresation 13y agoIt seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions Not all emails are created equally, and thus it is not a binary situation where emails either must all be treated equally, or they shouldn't be received. I absolutely love the tabs -- my primary email gets better attention than it ever did, while the various promotions and LinkedIn updates, etc, all get the quick browsing periodically. Honestly I probably pay more attention to the social/update/promotional emails than I ever did -- before I quickly tossed them aside while dealing with real stuff. Now during some downtime I switch on over to the promotional tab and see what deals are afoot, etc.
- 3JPLW 13y agoWow, I had no idea you could do that. Amusingly, you need to click the '+' tab button to remove the tabs. But it is wonderful to get rid of them. I, too, have had very important ticketing and banking emails filtered into the "Promotions" tab. Good riddance! And thank you.
- spankalee 13y agoWhenever I turn on a new automated filtering system, I spend time verifying and training it. The tabs have responded very quickly to my recategorizations.
- SEMW 13y agoExactly. It's possibly a bit disturbing that on hacker news, this thread consists of three people all complaining that, effectively, 'This bayesian filter doesn't quite do exactly what I want out of the box, so it's clearly broken and/or I'm not the target audience for it', instead of acknowledging that bayesian filters aren't psychic, and considering putting in the few seconds per email it takes to train them when they make a mistake.
- badman_ting 13y agoWho knows how it works? How am I supposed to know it's Bayesian? If G's magic works for people then great, but I just want to check my email without going into multiple little hidey-holes. If you're not the sort of person who gets tons of email, the value prop for stuff like this goes way down.
- dhugiaskmak 13y agoThis isn't Jimmy Growthtard's useless MVP. It's not a stretch to think that Google and their massive, massive, massive set of training data (i.e. everyone's e-mail) should be able to do better out of the box. Not being able to tell the difference between promotions and bank statements or travel bookings is a pretty huge failure to me.
- jstalin 13y agoI love the promotions tab. It keeps my inbox much cleaner and much easier to clean up. I browse the promotions tab, look for emails that I'm interested in reading, and "check unread" - "delete" the rest. Combined with the Disconnect and Ad Block Edge plugins, I see no ads either.
- tracker1 13y agoAs I have said in past threads about marketers who assume their promotional messages are anywhere near as important to me as personal email from friends... "fuck you" (the marketers, not jstalin) To me that should include the unsolicited bulk messages from recruiters, all the stupid social emails from twitter, facebook, linked-in etc too... It's overload.. there's too damned much of it. IMHO if you are a business and are sending more than one email a month that isn't regarding a direct transaction (your receipt, your order has shipped, etc)... you're sending out too much crap.
- graeme 13y agosocial emails: Filter them. I have email records of all FB messages, friend confirmations, etc. but they never hit my inbox promotional email: You're lumping everything together. Patio11's emails, which I signed up for and love reading, end up in the promotions tab. Have you heard of 'permission marketing'? Every email I get from a business, I asked for. I WANT to see them. If a business sends me too much, or stuff I don't want to see, I unsubscribe. It sounds like you've signed up for a bunch of things you don't want, and haven't unsubscribed.
- untothebreach 13y agoI think you are reducing this too much. It is not just a matter of whether I want email from a company or not. Just because I want email from them doesn't necessarily mean I _always_ want to read _everything_ they send me. Neither does it mean that I want to unsubscribe if they send me "too much," because "too much" is a function of how busy I am on a particular day, as well as how many unread emails I have that day. Having Gmail put these emails in their own tab means I don't have to explicitly add them all to a specific filter.
- btilly 13y agoThere nothing that I, as a user, like about the Gmail overhaul. :-( Really, Google, you have no clue how I want to organize my mail. Stop trying to guess and organize it for me. Or at least let me opt out of stuff I don't want.
- adidash 13y agoThats an interesting point. I would have liked if Google allowed me create custom tabs using filters.
- tiziano88 13y agoYou can assign labels based on filters already, the only difference is that you access labels on the left side, and tabs at the top.
- pekk 13y agoDid you try disabling the tabs other than primary?
- guyzero 13y agoYou can opt out of it... why are you phrasing it like you can't?
- btilly 13y agoReally? I opted out of it. The temporary opt out expired. I've now been forcibly opted in to the new theme, compose, etc. And was not offered any alternative. How do I tell it that I want to go back to my old version, complete with the custom theme chosen so that I had a fixed width font? Any suggestions?
- dredmorbius 13y agoYou've got the option of modifying any site's CSS, though some are more easily modified than others. Stylish, Stylebot, and other browser plugins exist for this, and once you create a theme it can be shared across multiple devices. I've used Stylebot rather beneficially on a large number (433 and counting) sites. Most are modified pretty easily, some I've taken slightly more work on. Note that this tends to presume a desktop OS. Many smartphone browsers don't support plugin architectures or similar modifications, though you can use alternate email applications for accessing gmail (e.g., K9Mail for Android).
- betterunix 13y agoI trained my local spam filter to do this years ago. Yes, I want confirmations about train and plane tickets; no, I do not want some clothing store's email about the latest sale on bathing suits. I only had to mark a dozen or so unwanted messages as spam, and a handful as not spam, and things just started working. I am also a bit concerned about this sort of statement: "MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point" Why does GMail actually allow that sort of tracking to happen? This is exactly why we do not follow external references in HTML mail (or just not allow HTML mail, though some places fail to even bother providing plaintext messages).
- gyardley 13y agoWhy does GMail allow users to see images in email? I assume it's because their users want to see images in email. I believe loading images is turned off by default and users have to enable it on a case-by-case basis, though.
- jeffasinger 13y agoThe default is no images, and users are given a choice to display images for one email only, or for all emails from a sender.
- tjtrapp 13y agofrom what i understand, gmail allows senders to opt-in to a "good known sender program" which then automatically shows images in a users inbox
- eli 13y agoAFAIK, there is no GMail list of known-good senders. When they refer to a "Trusted Sender" they mean someone you have personally emailed two or more times: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail&authuser=1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail... Actually a pretty clever compromise, IMHO.
- portmanteaufu 13y agoI disabled the promotions tab as soon as I realized that not having a promotions tab kept Google from injecting more ads into the experience. I use Google Apps and I hated that they were putting ads front-and-center in paid-for product.
- sologoub 13y agoThat's actually really messed-up. For normal Gmail, that seems very reasonable and convenient - present ads when I, as a user, indicate I'm looking for deals. With Google Apps, the assumption should be that this is a work email and deal hunting is not part of the normal job.
- kalleboo 13y agoWhere do you get ads in Google Apps email? I don't get them...
- eli 13y agoFree Google Apps accounts have ads.
- portmanteaufu 13y agoSo do the $5 per person per month accounts, apparently.
- kalleboo 13y agoAh, I was under the impression they had deprecated those
- eli 13y agoThey did, but there are many thousands of domains still out there.
- Oletros 13y agoIf you receive ads in a paid GAPPS account is because your administrator has turned on ads
- calbear81 13y agoI think marketers are more irked about the paid ads that surface to the top of the "promotions" tab that now push their emails further down the page. There's also a difference between promotional emails you signed up for via opt-in and targeted email ads that you didn't opt in for and the new design treatment blurs that line.
- eddieroger 13y agoIt's a welcomed change for me. There have been some missteps that needed training, but now it's smooth sailing. I just wish my phone didn't still chirp regardless of tab, but that's what I get for using a standard mail client I guess.
- corresation 13y agoI just wish my phone didn't still chirp regardless of tab What client/platform? Using the gmail client on Android, for me the experience has been that email to the alternate tabs don't count for notifications -- neither sound nor notification icon. It HUGELY reduced the amount of notification noise I was getting, and just for that is a huge improvement. Now when there is a notification it is almost always legitimate.
- sologoub 13y agoMy experience exactly! Until this change, I didn't quite realize that close to 80% of the chirps are just crap. Having to dig for stuff is a bit inconvenient, but it's a welcomed trade over the noise.
- 3825 13y agoI don't know what the OP meant but to me standard client means using IMAP/POP protocol as opposed to the official Google apps.
- sologoub 13y ago@3825, my guess was that OP is talking about iOS, where as @corresation are just commenting on how the experience is different for the Android app. I don't know if the official iOS GMail app has these changes or not.
- zellyn 13y agoJust a random reminder that when trying to install ack (or read the man page), the name you want is ack-grep. :-p
- koenigdavidmj 13y agoJust to let you know, not everyone in the world uses Ubuntu.
- zellyn 13y agoI thought it was Debian... but point taken!
- wnevets 13y agoI have yet to see one of these fake email ads.
- the_watcher 13y agoTo start - email marketing is a huge (and hugely profitable) part of my job. As a user, I love the changes - except for ads in the promotions tab. I am careful to only opt in to emails when necessary, and I regularly unsubscribe from those I don't like. I hate that now I get ads I did not give permission to in my inbox. Anyone know if CAN-SPAM specifically excludes "ads disguised as email" from its definition of spam?
- graeme 13y agoMy issue with the promotions tab is that any email subscription got sent there. I get virtually zero deals or offers in my inbox. But I have subscriptions to a couple of blogs, and mailing lists such as Patio11's I WANT to receive those emails. But gmail considered them 'promotions', and put them in another inbox, and showed them alongside ads. So I disabled the promotions tab. I would feel much better about the promotions tab if it could distinguish between permission based email newsletters, and pure offers.
- bengrunfeld 13y ago"But we want to keep sending you heaps of spam... It's not fair, Google! It's just not fair!" – Marketing peeps
- jayferd 13y ago'Syn'
- mcintyre1994 13y agoI received an email from Avaaz, a social campaigning organisation (www.avaaz.org) where they asked me to reply to avoid their notification emails being classified as promotional. I don't know how accurate that is, but it seemed surprising they were confident that could change the algorithm's mind. It sort of seems vaguely reasonable - you don't reply to promotional emails, but it also seems like something that would cause a lot of false positives. That said, that email ended up in notifications which seems correct, and I haven't seen anything misclassified into promotions yet.
- ntaylor 13y agoAs I recall, if you email/reply to someone in GMail they will be added to your contacts list.
- fleeno 13y agoI personally like the new promotions and social tabs, but we build lots of emailers for our clients and will probably have to educate their recipients as in the article. I did have to manually remove Rackspace ticket updates from the promotions tab. I was wondering why they weren't responding to me for a little while!
- Raphmedia 13y agoI really like the tabs. I have been opening promotions since they came out. Something I never did before. Made me discover Groupon. I love to take a look at the promotion tab from time to time.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThe future is clear! Google will provide you with a self driving car free of charge! The only issue will be that when you tell it you want to go to Safeway it will instead take you to a promoted supermarket, or if you want to see a movie it will take you to a theatre 25 miles away because that theatre bought Google CarWords on the advertising network. They work like AdWords but you get to bid on whether or not the car will bring them to your business when the customer asks to be driven to a business in your category.
- buro9 13y agoAnd in the end the Yellow Pages wins, paid placements beats out quality of result.
- bentcorner 13y agoMore subversively, ads purchased by companies may influence the route taken. When two routes are equal, ad buys are the tie breaker.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoFunny story, went to the Los Altos Art & Wine festival which had a free shuttle provided by a bus/limo service. The shuttle was a limo-type bus (held about 15 people in its config, as an actual bus it would have held 25) and was taking a really circuitous route to get from the high school to the festival and back. My wife and who road it one direction, and out walked it the other direction, realized that it was using this as a big advertising opportunity not actually trying to shuttle people. If you road the bus you got to see what a party bus was like on the inside, as you drive by people they get exposure to all the ads on the outside of the bus, and inside of course there were brochures if you wanted to rent them for your event. It was "free" but didn't do a very good job of being a "shuttle" (in terms of moving a meaningful quantity of people from remote parking to the festival)
- bennyg 13y agoI think that's a fair trade off.
- tn13 13y agoIt is expected that a lot of HN members approving this Google's move believing that it is designed to keep our inbox's clear. But in reality Google is simply killing off other people's marketing methods to promote it's own. As I have said before, Google's inbox is Good for the internet consumers, it is good for Google but it is very bad for everyone else.
- dannyr 13y ago"Google's inbox is Good for the internet consumers" Isn't that good enough? Good luck finding a solution where everyone wins.
- engrenage 13y agoIt's not good for consumers if it crushes other businesses.
- cenhyperion 13y agoIf me not immediately seeing promotionspam kills your business you have a flawed business model.
- engrenage 13y agoLike Adwords?
- jeremymims 13y agoThe biggest problem with these tabs is that there is a very clear tab missing: Content/Editorial/News/ These are newsletters I've subscribed to that aren't promotional. Some are educational, some are local news and stories, some are curated content lists. I read them for the content. I want them to show up in my primary inbox by default or at least in a "Content" tab. It's pure and simple mislabeling to wholesale throw them in the promotions bucket and cover them up with additional paid ads.
- bobx11 13y agoI think that there is so little legitimate news content in email and the offer emails masquerade as content, so it's impossible for a machine to tell them apart. I'd rather go in there once a day and pull out the things I care about than have yet another tab or have offers in my primary inbox. This inbox change has been my favorite gmail feature since using the service back when it was invite only.
- jeremymims 13y agoThere is a ton of legitimate content being regularly sent through e-mail. Most of it isn't targeted it at you and much of it is local in nature. If it's difficult for Google to ascertain who's promotional and who's not, create a system of evaluation for publishers to be certified and re-added to the primary list. Seems simple enough.
- simonsarris 13y agoDid anyone see Newegg's email begging customers to take their promotion emails out of the promotions tab? Amusingly you can read the email at promotions.newegg.com http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Aug-0-2013/GoogleTab14/index-landing.html?nm_mc=EMC-GGT081413&cm_mmc=EMC-GGT081413-_-EMC-081413-Index-_-Header-_-ClickHere& http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Aug-0-2013/GoogleTab14/...
- ocean12 13y agoI love the promotions tab for exactly the reason that marketers hate it. If I haven't opened an email in the promotions folder after a week, I've begun unsubscribing from it. And now a few weeks later my inbox's without the tabs (phone and tablet) are a lot cleaner and more sane. Newegg and Groupon and other mass marketers _have_ to hate this.
- voodoo123 13y agoI guess the next step is for them to put an 'ads' tab on the search engine and move all the ads into there.
- engrenage 13y agoSince the promotions tab is so great for consumers, the obvious next step down this path is to add an 'ads' tab to the search engine and move all the adverts into it. If people like them they'll know where to look.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cenhyperion 13y agoDeal with it. My inbox isn't a marketer's property.
- tn13 13y agoImagine a Cable Service provider that says: 1. We will show you only content and no ads in all the standard programming. (Of course the Cable service decides what is programming and what is Ads) 2. There will be a separate dedicated channel only for ads where the Cable Service authorized Ads will get priority. 3. The Cable Service Provider would show his ticker ads on all the channels. Obviously consumers would find an immense benefit in subscribing to such a hypothetical Cable Service. But the real problem with this would be the following: 1. Advertisers will see less value in advertising with Channels but instead they will advertise only with the Cable provider. 2. The production houses will earn less and hence will make less programs and poor quality programs in the long run. 3. Consumers will suffer in the long run. Go to think of it, Facebook's early day success and even the current progress was possible purely because of their aggressive email marketing strategy. All those friend invitations eventually forced everyone to join Facebook. If Gmail really wants to help fight spam and email marketing they could have done the simplest thing that Yahoo and AOL have been doing since inception. Give us a the complain reports. For example whenever a Yahoo! user marks a mail as spam, Yahoo notifies the email sender about this. This helps email marketeers to ensure that such person is not sent any mails in future. Wonder why Gmail cant do this.
- dspillett 13y agoHow dare they try make things more convenient for their users at the expense of marketers?!