
Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails? - ot
https://twitter.com/gulliantonio/status/357975467598422016
======
OoTheNigerian
So this is why they wanted to "help us" sort out our inbox? I feel defrauded
into believing their motivation.

Like suddenly realizing I was given a lift solely because my presence in the
car allowed the driver to enter my estate or place of work.

This is wrong.

~~~
harrytuttle
Did you pay for it?

No.

Quit complaining, pay for it (Google Apps), or move on.

~~~
anExcitedBeast
I don't think I buy this idea, and I don't think most honest developers would
either. People want to know when their users aren't happy with their service,
and they especially want to know if they're feeling alienated.

~~~
jusben1369
I think this is always a confusion point. Prior to the internet "user" and
"customer" were pretty much synonymous. Now they can be entirely different.
Users get confused when they miss this critical distinction.

~~~
jpadkins
No, everything is not new on the internet. Historically, this has always been
the Media business model (newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, etc). Editors have
balanced users and customers for a 100+ years.

~~~
jusben1369
Yes I agree. Good point.

------
dendory
Email used to be fun, then spammers came, then good email providers added spam
filters and made email fun again, now email providers are sending us spam. The
circle is almost complete.

~~~
weland
> now email providers are sending us spam

Mine isn't.

Get used to it: if you aren't paying for the service, you're not their client
and they are not your provider. You're their product.

It's not pretty, but sadly this is how life tends to work :-).

~~~
rfnslyr
What do you use? Better yet, what's an alternative to Google Apps I can use
for my domain?

~~~
josteink
Fastmail[1] is looking very nice, very fast and makes Google look like a
bloated pig.

The prices too are similar to Google apps, but I'm not sure I'm going to move
_all_ my stuff there (Google Docs at least needs a competitor).

I've yet to decide if I'm going full scale when I'm through my free trial.

[1] [http://fastmail.fm/](http://fastmail.fm/)

~~~
a3n
I've been using fastmail for two or three years, not sure. They're a very good
service for a surprisingly small amount of money.

I see anywhere from zero to two spams in my inbox per day. I just move them
over to my learn spam folder.

I just checked, and I have 270 spam messages in my junk folder since July 1.

I use their https web interface at work, not bad, nothing special. I use
thunderbird over imap at home.

So in exchange for about $10 or $20 per _year_ (depends on your service
level), and the occasional need to tell fastmail "this message is spam,
remember that for similar messages," I get an excellent imap service that is
not gmail and not google. I'm a customer, not a product, and I'm very happy.

EDIT: corrected how many junk I have. It's 270 since July 1. It's about 1000
since June 22. They delete junk after awhile. I just combed through the 1000
and moved 9 into the "this is not junk, remember that" folder.

------
skc
Horace Dediu's (asymco) graph of Googles rapidly declining margins probably
illustrates why Google is now resorting to this sort of thing.

[http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-
Shot...](http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-
Shot-2013-07-19-at-7-19-8.57.54-AM.png)

And related post.

[http://www.asymco.com/2013/07/19/whats-an-android-user-
worth...](http://www.asymco.com/2013/07/19/whats-an-android-user-worth/)

~~~
notintokyo
Anyone have an idea what is happening to their margins by the way? Who is
competing against the same ad dollars as Google (FB seems a bit different), if
cost per click is going down, why?

~~~
Spooky23
I think they are like any other big industrial company.

They build out factories (datacenters, networks, etc) based on a projection of
long-term growth. Once you start missing those growth targets, it's like
compounded interest... the impact of a small miss in year 1 has a big impact
on the year 5 bottom line.

They have a few issues IMO:

\- The market is saturated... how many more tiny classified ads can you sell?

\- The "less sophisticated" users who click on ads use Bing -- the Windows
default.

\- There are real competitors out there... Bing, Facebook, etc.

\- They piss off their hardcore users too much. Google+: enough said.

~~~
badclient
Also, because mobile has less space for adword ads.

------
alan_cx
While Im not sure my Karma would withstand a defense of this, if one _must_
have adverts, isn't sliding them in to the email list a better use of screen
real estate, compared to big blocks of in your face adverts? Assuming these
advmails are clearly marked as such.

I dont like it, and I'm not really a gmail user (I have an account as a sort
of throw away),but this does seem better than yahoo's big blocks of ads.
Although, I do block those.

On the other hand, is this not just way that gmail can defeat traditional ad-
blocking? Easier to block some nasty flash ad than it is to filter email?

~~~
tjoff
They take up more conscious space. You have to parse them more carefully if
they are right in the middle of the content that you actually want. Those big
blocks of in your face adverts don't require any attention at all and they
it's trivial to use your brains inbuilt adblock to filter them out.

So, if one must have adverts, the usual form factor is vastly preferred.
Especially if the alternative is trying to masquerade spam as legit content.

------
AndrewDucker
I'd love for Google to work out how much money they make from me in a year,
and then to offer to go ad-free for 50% more than that.

At least then I could make an informed decision.

~~~
igul222
The problem is if Google were to do that, the value of their ads would plummet
since the kind of people who would pay to opt out of ads are the same people
who would be most likely to pay for things in ads.

Not 100% sure but I think this is is the same reason TV companies don't want
to offer their content for streaming online, and Hulu can't remove ads for its
premium users.

~~~
tomp
I'd say it's exactly the reverse. The people who are most bothered by ads are
the people to whom the ads provide the lowest value, and are thus the least
likely to click them. For example, me.

~~~
ryan-allen
I tend to agree with this. I rarely, if ever, click on ads because they seem
interesting. I mostly see an ad and say "oh that is interesting, I was
searching for cars before and now I'm being advertised cars on a music site,
how completely useless".

The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true
value to customers (except for perhaps their 'first page at the top' paid ads,
I use them a lot, mostly because I figure companies willing to pay for ads
usually are a likely 'proper solid business').

Most of the adsense these days is 'trick next buttons', where people put them
at the bottom of a page that appears to be the 'next page' button, and it's
not.

I spend absolute craptonnes of money of stuff I don't need. Internet
advertisements I am exposed to contribute almost zero impact to my purchasing
habits.

Except for Belroy wallets. I have no idea how they figured to target me
('hipster' programmer?), but I did end up buying a wallet from them when their
ads followed me around for a while. And their products are nice :) But that is
it!

I couldn't care less if they are giving backdoors to the NSA to all my email
including all company crap that is confidential and all. If they put ads into
my email I will look elsewhere unless there is a paid option.

~~~
Lerc
>The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true
value to customers.

I doubt that adsense has positive overall value to advertisers either. Weigh
the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the
revenue resulting from that advertising. Some people will be able to make it
work but I really don't think it's a large percentage.

According to Wikipedia Google made $42 billion in adwords revenue in 2012.
That's like $6 from each person on the planet.

Do adwords really have enough power to increase operating profit by that much?

~~~
takluyver
> Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get
> from the revenue resulting from that advertising.

I'm kind of assuming that every company doing advertising is continually
making that calculation, and deciding that it _does_ come out in their favour.
Otherwise we wouldn't see nearly so much advertising.

~~~
Lerc
I tend to assume the reason why we see so much advertising is because they
_don't_ make that calculation.

~~~
vdaniuk
That would be true for the old media. OTOH, online advertising is extremely
data-oriented, especially in the US. Most business decisions are based on
data. Businesses may be using wrong models or assumptions about the
correlation or causation between advertising and revenue, but there is a very
strong effort to analyze data for revenue growth.

------
Tyrannosaurs
So to all intents and purposes this is targeted, Google endorsed spam
delivered directly to my inbox?

If that's the case then it could be time to start looking for a replacement
for the last Google product I use.

~~~
icebraining
It's in the "Promotions" tab, not the primary inbox. Personally, I think there
are better reasons to leave Gmail (which is why I did so years ago).

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
So if I've got rid of that (generally I have fewer than half a dozen e-mails
in my inbox so tabs were pretty pointless for me) where do they appear? My
assumption was in the regular inbox.

~~~
icebraining
Those are clearly "special" emails, so I don't think it can be safely assumed
they would be processed the same way as normal emails - it would have to be
tested.

Personally, I think Google added the Promotions tab exactly because they knew
they would get a major backlash against putting ads in the normal inbox.

~~~
amirmc
Interesting. That could mean that this is a stop-gap before ads appear in the
main inbox for users who don't use tabs. I expect that would take years though
as people would need to be conditioned to the current system first. In any
case it feels like a slightly underhanded way to 'subscribe' you to 'mail' you
didn't ask for.

I use Gmail over IMAP so no of the web UI stuff they've done has affected me
at all (in aggregate, I feel that's worked in my favour).

------
martin-adams
Yes, I saw this, but seems to be limited to the Promotions filtered tab which,
well, an advert next to an advert. I'm kind of okay with that. But it does
make you wonder if this is the start of a slippery slope.

~~~
asfasfafwF
I think this is a slippery slope. They are essentially unsolicited mail that
you never asked for. Some people will genuinely use the promotions tab to
receive email from companies for which they have requested promotions be sent
to them. Google is getting a free ride without permission.

~~~
Colliwinks
Exactly: "Promotions" is not "Spam". There is already a spam folder, so these
should go straight in there, if anywhere.

How does this fit in with the CAN-SPAM act?

"Unsubscribe compliance

    
    
        A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
        Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
        Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

"

If there is no unsubscribe option, are google in violation? (Their get-out may
be that these are not actual emails, but by making the transition from clear
ad space to inbox, most people would argue that the delivery mechanism is
irrelevant)

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
They're adverts presented in the same place you see your e-mails but as they
haven't been sent the the way an e-mail is, they won't have used any e-mail
protocol, you won't be able to reply to them as e-mails and so on so they
aren't e-mails so won't be covered by this.

~~~
3JPLW
So does this also mean that they won't show up in IMAP clients?

~~~
bearbin
Yes

------
Nux
Given that this is avoidable by using any POP or IMAP client, I wonder how
soon they'll close them down. I'm pretty sure it's a matter of "when".

~~~
zmmmmm
I think it's a good benchmark of their real intentions whether they interfere
with those at all. At the moment, because any user can bail out to an IMAP or
POP client, including 3rd party web services that behave as those, there is a
natural limit to how obnoxious Google can be. If they degrade their native web
inbox sufficiently, people will switch to alternatives in droves (I already
have long ago).

~~~
Nux
Indeed, we'll know their real intentions once they interfere with those
services, however a bad precedent has already been created: their jabber/xmpp
service.

Anyone with Android phones, what's the default way to check your emails, IMAP?
If yes, then there is still some hope. :-)

------
tnkd
Registered specifically to post this.

Today seems to be an interesting day on HN.

First, Google's ad revenue's are down ~5%, every jumps up and down saying the
end is near and they need to shape up before they fade into irrelevance.

Now a hint of a forthcoming feature where they are doing just that, making a
change to increase revenue and people lose their minds.

Lets think about this. The feature is under Promotions, a section already
laden with junk for most people. Are we all saying that John from "matresses
online" can send me news about this weeks greatest sleep position and special
offers like 5% off pillow fluffing, but Google couldn't input it's own ad,
which would likely be tailored to your interests in any case? If you signup to
promotions for numerous sources (enough to warrant the promotions tab) you
might appreciate the ad, no? If you don't, well you'll never be in the
Promoted tab in most cases anyway, so it likely wont affect you all that much
(assuming they wouldn't inject ad's into main inbox stream).

~~~
scholia
> The feature is under Promotions, a section already laden with junk for most
> people

In my case, as a journalist, it includes a huge amount of useful email. Either
way, I'd have to check it often, because Gmail's sorting into categories is
abysmal. (For the same reason I have to check the spam folder multiple times a
day. It contains a high proportion of legitimate email.)

However, it's a moot point because I turned the tabs off within a day.

------
dm8
Okay. So this style of advertising is known as "native/integrated
advertising". As someone who runs a startup doing the same, I have few things:

1\. Google has been doing this for years. It was known as "adwords". It's
multi-billion dollars tool that gave birth to SEM.

2\. It is limited to promotions tab. Promotions tab is where users go to check
their promotional emails. I doubt Gmail will move them to real inbox. In fact,
they will be foolish to do so. It's pretty smart move.

3\. It is clearly marked as an ad with yellow background. So user is clearly
informed about advertisement.

It's understandable that users are freaking out a little. But c'mon gmail has
been doing ads in their inbox for a while. Email is extremely personal medium
and they will be foolish to move ads from promotions tab to inbox tab. Google
has lot of smart folks on their teams so we can trust them for the same.

~~~
echohack
I have a few things too:

1\. This new "feature" is basically automated filters. Most folks who've used
gmail for years have at least some filters set up. Google didn't say anything
about throwing ads in the promotions tab, so this is a little...strange.

2\. Slippery slope. How long until this populates the main inbox tab? I bet
google could even charge differently depending on which tab you want your ads
to show up in.

3\. XMPP Federation. Google Reader. Google Wave. How long will it be until
Gmail is either axed or full of so many ads that it's unusable?

4\. Does Adblock / NoScript block these? Can it?

5\. The history of Gmail was that it was a next-generation email service and
started as an invite only club. Now, every email provider under the sun gives
similar features, and gmail hasn't changed much. Personally I think that this
is a good thing, it shows that the service is stable and the ideas were
correct. But people at Google might think otherwise and might want to try to
"innovate" more. Sooo... ads.

~~~
dm8
1\. I agree, Google must do something to inform users about these auto
categorizations

2\. I doubt they will populate primary inboxes with ads. They created
promotions tab for that so they must've thought about it long and hard.
Believe me, when people like me who work in ads businesses think about
introducing new ads/formats, we worry about lot of things. Ads are not about
making money. Ads are about ensuring users find them useful, brands also
demand that. Lastly, even if I run ad related business, I'm an average user
too, I have my family who have no clue about how digital advertising works. So
whatever decisions I make is important for me, my family and my users given
it's implications.

3\. Google axed some of the products you mentioned cause they were not
sustainable for them. I doubt that will be the case for Gmail. It's most
popular web-mail service.

4\. No they can't as far as my knowledge goes. But someone might figure out a
way to block them.

5\. I was part of invite only club in 2004. And I also miss some of the
cutting-edge innovations that gmail brought e.g. storage, speed, agility etc.
I personally find these auto categorizations to be extremely useful. It has
cleaned up my cluttered inbox. And ads are also part of it but their impact is
minimal.

------
moskie
Hate to say "I told you so," but:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5787363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5787363),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5787398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5787398)

~~~
anon1385
That's hilarious. You would think people would stop giving Google the benefit
of the doubt when it comes to anything advertising related, but fanboys seem
to feel no embarrassment at being proven wrong time and time again. Choice
quotes:

 _No. It files all your emails that it classifies as promotional but non-spam.
That won 't include Google Offers and Zagat if you're not subscribed to Google
Offers or Zagat (for me, it's mostly events & careers newsletters). It's just
an auto-categoriser (a new UI for smart labels), it doesn't invent new emails
that weren't there before._

 _I think you misunderstand what that tab is for. It 's not a place for Google
advertising; it's a place where promotional emails from any site are
automatically sorted into - to keep them separate from other useful email.
E.g. a clothing website that sends emails about weekly sales - that'll end up
under Promotional._

 _the "Promotions" label is applied to your incoming mail that is best
classified as a "Promotion", such as any promotional email from sites you shop
at - it's not additional content that Gmail is feeding you. _

------
jstalin
Having used Adblock (currently Adblock Edge) and Ghostery/Disconnect for so
long, I haven't seen ads in ages. It's actually a bit jarring when I use a
computer that doesn't have ad blocking enabled... everything suddenly gets so
cluttered.

~~~
namwen
Yeah, I've visited websites for years that I felt were very well designed in
regards to being open and having a nice amount of whitespace. Seeing the same
site on someone else's computer is a bit heartbreaking.

------
mseebach
There have always been ads in GMail, and they have always been clearly marked
as ads. These new ads are still clearly marked as ads, and clearly distinct
from emails, they are just placed slightly differently in the UI.

------
adamnemecek
If this becomes a thing, I might actually switch to something else.

~~~
sitharus
I've been actively looking for alternatives recently after all their
"improvements" kept breaking my flow.

Unfortunately there isn't much out there :/

~~~
minikites
Fastmail is pretty great.

~~~
mbesto
I've just noticed the praise recently for this. Two dealbreakers for me:

\- No push on iPhone (as far as I can see)

\- No Calendar integration

~~~
minikites
Yeah, Apple doesn't support IMAP-IDLE which is a drag, so push is out. And
you're right, there's no calendar. I also hear LDAP is read-only on devices,
so you can't add to your Fastmail address book from your iPhone.

I personally don't use any of those things anyway but I can definitely
understand why that would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people. It's great for
email and the webmail interface got way better recently. Their blog is also
pretty neat, they go into a fair bit of technical detail about new features
and how they solved certain bugs: [http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-
tab-communication-u...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-
communication-using-local-storage/)

------
toble
Wouldn't it be anti-competitive to block spam, yet let your own spam through?
The ads in that screenshot look like they are effectively imitating spam.

------
Joeboy
There needs to be a docker.io image with a (mostly) preconfigured mailserver,
roundcube and PGP. Maybe it exists already? If not I might make one.

------
tszming
It would be more easy for you to switch to other providers if you own your
domain - now you know why Google removed the free Google app for custom domain
last year...Don't forget the story of XMPP, who know they will not remove
pop3/imap access in the future because these standards are not able to catch
up the Gmail's upcoming revolutionary features?

After all, all these moves are understandable - they now have nearly 50K
employees, shareholders have high expectation on the "growth" and they need to
invest on projects like glasses, self driving car and maybe mars exploration!
Where does the money come from? I would expect Google will receive less
criticism if they simply remove the "Don't be evil" from their company motto -
then we can say Microsoft/Yahoo! is doing the same thing, why complain?

------
NirDremer
I've tried outlook.com and it was OK. I wonder if this can help make hotmail
relevant again.

~~~
lostlogin
I like some elements of iCloud for email, however its lack of settings (want
to have your outgoing mail appear to come from john@doe.com? Tough) and
terrible terrible search are a bit of deal breaker. How is the search so bad?
I usually resort to just scrolling back through emails rather than use it.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
Seriously. I usually end up grabbing my iPhone and doing a search there
instead of via the web interface. So, so bad.

------
thejosh
Who would have that that a major change would be used to provide
advertisements from the biggest online advertising company?

------
supercoder
I wonder, will this be how they start to push ads into IMAP clients ?

------
6ren
Cue: If you're not the customer, you're the product.

For balance: linux and open source in general.

~~~
tiziano88
What do linux and open source have to do with this at all?

~~~
6ren
They are a counter-example: you are not the customer (you aren't paying for
it), but you also are not the product.

~~~
jpadkins
Actually, I think you are the product for free software. Think in terms of
non-monetary rewards. Developers get satisfaction and sense of achievement
from the number of users using their software. So your usage is actually the
'product'.

------
superuser2
There is an awful lot of righteous indignation here over Google placing ads
_where you 'll only see them if you're looking for ads_.

------
kaeluka
ok, now I'm officially on the market for alternatives.

Maybe I should go back to good old mutt..

~~~
fuzzix
fetchmail/getmail your gmail, read with mutt, send with msmtp.

~~~
pjmlp
Pine! :)

~~~
raverbashing
Alpine ;)

------
dalore
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a little bit and say that the email-
like-ads are in your promotions tab. A tab that is meant for ads. I turned off
the tabs and I don't get the email ads.

------
netcan
I'm surprised ads is what gets people up in arms.

Google knowitall overlords logging your whole digital and physical life. Media
bubble. Emails shared with spooks.

Ads are annoying. I get that. This is less annoying than youtube ads. Less
annoying than TV ads (even if you can fastforward them). Anyway, annoying is
not the same as evil. Gmail is convenient. Ads are annoying. If (annoying >
convenient), use something else.

------
DanielBMarkham
So no matter how many times I click on the "spam" button on these things, I'm
always going to be getting them. Great.

------
plg
I wonder at what point the ads appear to have come from one of your legitimate
contacts.

PS isn't faceboob already doing this?

------
cwdutch
Isn't this old news? It's very interesting, because on top of the ad
placement, the binning of promotions may radically reduce the efficacy of
email-based sales. Fab, Groupon, Grand St., etc, are probably not too happy
about this.

------
dschiptsov
Well, when users developed a habit of ignoring ads they must push it the other
way, like FB did with placing ads in a news feed as stories. The same premise,
the same response.

Just think of Promotions tab as a new SPAM folder.)

------
dokem
Oh no, a company that gives me everything for free is displaying non intrusive
ads in the wrong part of the screen and even tells me that they are ads! I'm
too entitled for this!

------
dannyr
Wow. A lot of discussion from a single tweet. Do we have all the information?

It's very likely a test. Google does a lot of testing that ultimately is not
publicly released.

------
wjk
The tabs are nice and all. But is there a way to have both the tabs and a
button so i can see all emails at once in 1 tab? Been clicking around with no
success.

~~~
scholia
Same here. I can't see any way to see all mail either, apart from turning off
the tabs. Which I did.

The tabs were pretty much useless anyway, because the sorting is so bad. I
have one important category of mail that's already tagged with a label, and
Gmail had examples under three different tabs. That's so incompetent it's
almost malign.

------
hafichuk
So they kill Reader and "socialize" email. What's next google, and what are
you going to do to keep us techies folded in?

------
akadien
Gmail gets creepier and creepier. I'm not there yet, but I'm close to looking
for alternatives.

------
antihero
Is there a good way to sync contacts to my (Android, but possibly soon
FirefoxOS) phone with FastMail?

------
cenhyperion
I've been using an email client and slowly migrating to a @mydomain email for
personal contacts.

------
nikbackm
No problem for me, I just turned the feature off.

But maybe it will become mandatory in due time?

------
markshepard
I just use the Mail client in my mac. so I dont even see any change so far.

------
mtgx
If only this meant they're now more likely to implement PGP in Gmail.

~~~
mikegioia
Web-based PGP is a bad idea from a security standpoint.

Why would you want GMail to handle your PGP encryption, when it's basically
known that they hand over email content to the USG? You think your PGP keys
would be safe there?

If people want to encrypt their web-mail using a web client they might as well
just run the email message through a shift cipher because that's about the
upper bound on security you can expect.

------
dannyr
Seriously, it's in the PROMOTIONS tab which you can TURN OFF.

Why the rage here?

~~~
bbrks
Because the ideal use case would be people seeing promotions they want. Not
what google thinks they want.

------
moskie
Switch back to Priority Inbox while you can!

(until, of course, they sunset it.)

------
leke
After reading this, I really should donate to AdBlockPlus.

------
ing33k
was getting this since almost a month..

------
Filecloud
It is wrong in so many levels. Couple of years back we were talking google may
send you an email advertising cremation services based on your email history.
It is becoming a reality. The worrying part is upright, honest googlers are
supporting it whole heartedly.

------
workbench
Feeling pretty smug about never jumping on the gmail bandwagon right now

~~~
psbp
I'm still feeling pretty good about jumping on.

