

A new, more visual way to view your Promotions tab - rkudeshi
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-new-more-visual-way-to-view-your.html

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teleclimber
I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail".

Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your
packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all
of them in a single list without distinction.

Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt
their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an
easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages
maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").

~~~
eli
More cynically, it's also a great way to get people to tolerate high-value
google ads in their inbox.

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Derbasti
I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay
with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind
of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero.

Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to
transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More
like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere
on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started
out as.

~~~
hcurtiss
What did you move to?

~~~
Derbasti
Mostly native clients. And a provider that hosts in the same country I live in
(Germany), that values my privacy, and uses green energy.

~~~
JetSpiegel
I don't understand why people don't use native clients more.

Every time I say I use Thunderbird people look to me like I eat soup with a
fork or something.

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snoonan
They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions
and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads.

From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers
like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty
visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out
other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something.
(which is almost all the time)

The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail
customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not.
That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email...

edit: I a word.

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frade33
Would you please leave my email alone. there are already 1000 and 1
distractions in my life over the internet.

by the way what is the price tag of Gmail. If I ever get rich I would buy it
and let it be what it is. an email service.

~~~
jtreminio
This is an opt-in thing.

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ryanlchan
This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used
Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than
the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to
open a message, even one promotional in nature.

[1] [http://www.altomail.com](http://www.altomail.com)

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nisa
The promotion tab does not work for me. A lot of my emails are miscategorized
into it. E.g. monitoring emails.

A flexible tab system would be really great. The Google machine learning
approach does not work for me.

Am I the only that experience this issues?

~~~
alwaysdoit
You can drag messages from one tab to another. It will ask you if you want to
put all messages from that sender into that category in the future.

~~~
nisa
Yes. It's a usability nightmare. I can't do it for all messages at once..., if
I scroll down the tab is gone... hell I can't even move messages to the
Inbox.. only labels and other tabs are possible.

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plorg
I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of
filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up
another 30px of vertical screen real estate.

I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads.
(Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my
messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under
"Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from
which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging
users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.

~~~
aiiane
A lot of people don't want to spend the time to set up filters. Not everyone
who uses GMail is a HN user.

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lgp171188
Since their primary stream of revenue is advertising, they want to get more
eyeballs on the promotional emails, most of which are ads.

~~~
Theodores
My promotions tab is 3rd party emails. It will be interesting to see how this
looks, will they make thumbnails of promotion emails or pick an image? How
will this affect statistics for folk at Mailchimp et al? what about the little
guy who sends a couple of hundred promotions out via a Mailchimp? Will their
'open' stats be skewed?

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thanatropism
STOP MESSING WITH WEB MAIL.

I have to get OwnCloud running on the server I already rent for an inane IRC
bot.

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tenaciousJk
My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since
their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits
back?

~~~
k-mcgrady
Why would Google want to get those visits back? Things in the promotions tab
are essentially competing against Google's own ads in Gmail so it probably
benefits Google that you don't look at them.

~~~
danieldk
Weren't they inserting ads in the promotions tab that look like regular
e-mails?

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-
gmails...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4546906/google-uses-gmails-
promotions-inbox-to-promote-a-new-kind-of-ad)

The plan seems kind of simple here:

\- Make the promotions tab nicer.

\- More eyeballs for placed advertisements.

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petercooper
Okay, so how do the ones that are just text appear, I wonder? (Like my
newsletters, for users who've not yet moved them back to their Inbox.)

