
Gmail Overhaul Has Marketers Saying 'Ack' - adidash
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323455104579015021688974880-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNTExNDUyWj.html
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jstalin
I 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
As 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
social 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.

~~~
kbatten
I have had a problem where people sign up for stuff using my email address.
Yes I can (and do) unsubscribe, but it is really nice that these are now
pretty much all filtered out of my inbox automatically.

I've never seen a marketer verify email to make sure it was actually the
requester who owns the email like other web services do.

~~~
kareemm
Almost all the big email marketing software sends you an email after sign up
to verify you want to receive emails from them. It's called "double opt-in".

~~~
dredmorbius
Key word: "almost".

I've got a large and growing procmail list of complete idiots (yep, shell mail
on a private box).

------
ChuckMcM
The 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.

~~~
bentcorner
More subversively, ads purchased by companies may influence the route taken.

When two routes are equal, ad buys are the tie breaker.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Funny 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
I think that's a fair trade off.

------
simonsarris
Did 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/...](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&)

~~~
ocean12
I 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.

------
dcminter
I 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.

~~~
spankalee
Whenever 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
Exactly.

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.

~~~
dhugiaskmak
This 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.

~~~
SEMW
The problem being there's no universal definition of "better". My guess is
it's not a matter of "not being able to tell the difference" \- it's putting
bank statements in 'promotions' because people have been putting their bank
statements there. People who want to receive them for their records, but not
have them 'in their face' in their primary inbox.

(Should those people have put dragged them to another tab - maybe 'Updates'
rather than 'Promotions'? Possibly. If you think so, drag them to there
instead. That'll change it for you, and presumably, if enough people do that
it'll eventually change the categorisation for everyone who hasn't changed it
themselves).

------
jeremymims
The 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
I 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
There 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.

------
betterunix
I 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
Why 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.

~~~
tjtrapp
from 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
AFAIK, 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...](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail&authuser=1)

Actually a pretty clever compromise, IMHO.

~~~
tjtrapp
From the gmail bulk senders guidelines, "We also recommend publishing an SPF
record and signing with DKIM. We do not authenticate DKIM using less than a
1024-bit key. By authenticating, inline images you send will be shown
automatically. Recipients will not need to click the "Display images below"
link."

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?topic=12838](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?topic=12838)

ok, so no opt-in... =)

~~~
eli
Huh, interesting. I'm not sure that page is accurate. In my personal account
I've never noticed that behavior -- even on messages I send which have a valid
SPF + DKIM and a 1024 bit key.

------
eddieroger
It'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
_I 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
My 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.

~~~
sologoub
@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.

------
calbear81
I 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.

------
zellyn
Just a random reminder that when trying to install ack (or read the man page),
the name you want is ack-grep. :-p

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Just to let you know, not everyone in the world uses Ubuntu.

~~~
zellyn
I thought it was Debian... but point taken!

------
portmanteaufu
I 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.

~~~
kalleboo
Where do you get ads in Google Apps email? I don't get them...

~~~
eli
Free Google Apps accounts have ads.

~~~
kalleboo
Ah, I was under the impression they had deprecated those

~~~
eli
They did, but there are many thousands of domains still out there.

------
tn13
It 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
"Google's inbox is Good for the internet consumers"

Isn't that good enough?

Good luck finding a solution where everyone wins.

~~~
engrenage
It's not good for consumers if it crushes other businesses.

~~~
cenhyperion
If me not immediately seeing promotionspam kills your business you have a
flawed business model.

~~~
engrenage
Like Adwords?

------
tn13
Imagine 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.

------
graeme
My 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.

~~~
walls
You can just drag any newsletter back to 'primary' and it will no longer end
up in promotions.

~~~
graeme
That's true. But in my case, there's actually none of my mail I want in
promotions.

For regular users, I expect many of them will not do that. Defaults are
powerful.

------
the_watcher
To 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?

------
mcintyre1994
I 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
As I recall, if you email/reply to someone in GMail they will be added to your
contacts list.

------
Raphmedia
I 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.

------
fleeno
I 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!

------
wnevets
I have yet to see one of these fake email ads.

------
dspillett
How _dare_ they try make things more convenient for their users at the expense
of marketers?!

------
cenhyperion
Deal with it. My inbox isn't a marketer's property.

------
btilly
There 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.

~~~
guyzero
You can opt out of it... why are you phrasing it like you can't?

~~~
btilly
Really?

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
You'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).

------
jayferd
'Syn'

------
engrenage
Since 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.

------
bengrunfeld
"But we want to keep sending you heaps of spam... It's not fair, Google! It's
just not fair!" – Marketing peeps

