Can you elaborate on why you feel it's disheartening?
I dunno. Automatically identifying "Promotions" and sending them off to their own tab seems to be good for helping me avoid dealing with things trying to get me to spend money when I don't want to, just the same as doing the same thing for "Spam" does.
> It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.
Seems to me to be exactly the opposite: having a "Promotions" tab separate from the "Primary" inbox, and especially automatically routing promotional material to that "Promotions" tabl seems to draw the line between the normal content of my inbox and marketing/advertising material more clearly than it is without that feature.
(Which, if you think about it, makes sense from a purely self-interested point of view for Google-as-ad-seller; the easier it is for you to isolate and ignore email-based advertising, the more valuable the web-based advertising that Google sells is.)
Whichever tabs you choose to have (and if you use the layout, you choose which of the tabs are active) are available as views into your email. This both makes them out-of-the-way when their subject isn't what you want to view, and available when it is.
> The point of filtering out spam (given the more pleasant name "Promotions" now)
Not the same thing: spam (unsolicited commercial email) is still spam. Promotions are for promotions that aren't spam. The reasons why you might not want them in your normal email box are similar, but the probability that you will at some time want to review promotions for more than "did something get here by accident".
Yeah. They used to automatically file non-spam promotional emails into a separate folder where you could safely ignore them, but now they just go into your regular inbox! Money-grabbing so and so's.
(...is what you'd be saying if this feature were being eliminated rather than introduced...)
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.
Several people in this thread have already explained this. If you don't believe us, go to gmail and switch to the new view - there doesn't seem much point in doing competing close-readings of a short blog post when you can see how it works first hand...