Gmail now features ads that look like emails | Hacker News Reader

Gmail now features ads that look like emails

marketingland.com

160 pointsowenwil62 comments

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6068873

Why is this at the bottom?

Because Google fanboys flag anything anti-Google. It has been happening often recently: stories that paint Google in a negative light fall off the front page despite continuing to receive a ton of upvotes and comments.

Title is wrong/linkbait. Not 'your inbox'. Actual title is: "New Gmail Inbox Features Ads That Look Like Emails, Above Promotional Email Subscriptions" (emphasis mine).

The previous discussion had this distinction all over the place as well, but...I've looked at what's in my promotions tab, and a few mailing lists and some of the shop member mail I subscrided went there by default. 'Promotions' is set as a split part of my inbox, not some feature coming out of nowhere with whole new and google only content. Having junk ads in there is the same as having junk ads in my inbox.

PS: yes I can just get rid of the new tabs and go back to the old layout, and tha's what I did. I just hink the difference made between the main tab and promotions tab doesn't seem meaningful in this discussion.

Technically all they did in the tabbed layout was swap the old ads which hovered over the Inbox message list with embedded ads in the Promotion tab.

So the choice is between "Ads in Inbox list + Ads in message view" VS "Ads in Promotions tab + Ads in message view". There's no real difference between tabbed inbox style and the classic inbox styles except presentation if you think about it.

Except that presentation is important. An ad that looks like an email is, in a sense, deceptive, masquerading as something you've valued enough to put in your inbox (well, at least enough not to bother opting out from...).

Reminds me of "Download Now" ads that purport to look like the one legit download link. It turns into a game of "try not to download malware".

I disabled all those ridiculous tabs. Thanks for cluttering gmail google, because god knows simplicity is incongruent with the new Google.

Luckily it's easy to disable, or I'd be jumping ship now. Just turn off the tabs and the ads go with them - and the tabs are pretty useless anyway.

The tabs have already improved my Gmail experience tremendously so not sure why you think they are useless.

In my case they're useless because I read email via IMAP -- I only ever visit the web interface if I don't have access to my laptop or want to flag something as spam.

More to the point, I do not want some algorithm "helpfully" sorting my incoming email into different views according to some opaque criteria that I don't get to define or tweak: I want to see everything in my default inbox, no exceptions.

Permitting someone else to sort my mail via rules I have not defined is how important business email gets missed or overlooked.

> according to some opaque criteria that I don't get to define or tweak

Exactly this. When I saw the tabbed inbox, my first thought was, "oh, this will be cool", followed shortly by, "wait, I don't get to control or customize this at all?"

Really, why can't I define my own tabs for specific searches/labels? The black box tabs they provide now should just have been defaults within a customizable feature.

You can customize it but the UI isn't particularly obvious. You can drag emails between tabs to teach gmail which is the most appropriate tab, you can also designate inboxes as a filter action.

Personally I think it's a great feature but one I won't be using because I already have a labyrinth of filter rules that perform the same function.

I've been surprised at how well the new tab system has been working. How could you make a filter that would sort on the broad criteria of "promotions" and "social"?

Some machine learning algorithm; it's not so different from classifying emails as spam/not spam.

He/she asked how to do it with filters.

If you move messages to [Gmail]/Spam, it should report them as spam. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/77657?hl=en

I deal with email as it arrives striving for inbox zero. Having to click on multiple tabs slows me down. There is no different priority to my incoming emails. If it is unimportant I unsubscribe or mark as spam.

Tabs are the same thing conceptually as the filters on the right. I don't see how the tabs improve anything.

Not OP, but in my experience I always shoot for inbox zero - So I only need my inbox, archive, and starred folder really. I sift through my emails and archive everything that doesn't need my attention, and star anything that does - After I have nothing left in my inbox I give any emails in my starred folder attention.

Why not just use pop3/imap or something?

adblock?

FastMail(.fm) costs $19.95 per year with 1 GB of storage and $39.95 with 10 GB of storage. And no ads, no NSA etc.

Stop complaining. Change provider.

From the Fastmail thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070070

Fastmail has servers in the United States (https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html), which means the NSA can still request access to those servers.

I thought that the NSA was grabbing all data going through the cables at large ISPs so that they don't need to send requests at individual companies? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

I work for FastMail. We (Opera Software Australia) are an Australian company, subject to Australian privacy laws regardless of the location of our servers. We legally must only respond to Australian law enforcement agencies with valid Australian warrants (summary of the law is available here: https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/tia.html).

What happens if your hosting company gets an NSA request to access your servers?

Being Australian probably makes it easier on the NSA, not harder. They're allowed to spy unfettered on foreigners.

What leads you to believe that the NSA isn't monitoring FastMail?

The article was about intrusive advertisements not who is or isn't monitoring which email providers. Switching to fast mail solves the problem the article was complaining about!

dotcoma's comment however, claimed "no NSA etc". While it's not pertinent to this article, I think pointing out spurious claims (which people might be believing and acting on) has value regardless.

But dotcomas comment was claiming "No NSA".

Rackspace Mail is $2/mo/mailbox. That gets you a 100% uptime SLA, 25GB storage, configurable daily backups and 24/7/365 phone/chat/mail support.

http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/

Price is kinda misleading. It requires to add Microsoft Exchange (+10$ per month) or buy 5+ mailboxes

Almost certainly NSA'd, their SLA is along the same line as Google's (i.e. your compensation for critical email going down is an absolute pittance), not sure why I should be handling the backups.

Nice support, though. One thing that Rackspace is really, really good at.

Or Google Apps for $50 per year with 30GB of storage. No need to change platforms.

I read information there, instead of complaint. It's just like we live in the city and there are many ads on the road. Ads in Google Mail, so far, are not so annoying as other free email provider did.

Or use Namecheap Email Hosting which is free for the first year and beginning at $2.99/year (3GB) after that.

It uses Open-Xchange as the web UI.

Another option, Lavabit is $16 for 2 years.

$19.95 for 1gb of storage? Never thought I'd consider $1.66 / month to be a rip off.

Funny that the industry fights spam until it comes full circle and starts introducing its own version of spam but it's not called spam, it's advertising.

cf. Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter

That's nothing. Wait till they start streaming context dependent ads straight to your Google Glass :)

* Getting in your 2008 Toyota... Tada! An ad presenting the 2013 model.

* Walking by a Nike store... Tada! An ad featuring new sneakers.

* About to make love and for some reason left your Glass on... Tada! A safe sex promotion ad.

> About to make love

Would be amused to see the criteria/logic used to isolate that scenario! Perhaps if Glass was monitoring current room, spoken words, heartbeat...

Yep, not far off from many cyber-punk movies. Future is now :)

You can also pay for google apps and get ad free interface with tech support, last I checked.

Serious question (couldn't find it and mailing Google is not very effective usually): can I keep my current email address and convert it to paid Google apps? It would be absolutely useless if not :)

I don't think so, at least not directly. Paid google apps requires you to use your own domain name as far as I know. Even so, you can set your old account to forward to your new, and add your old account as a sender on your new and make it the default. That way all email you send/receive on the new account will go to/come from the old account.

It does actually seem to be the case, I was wrong [1].

[1]: http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/BitTorrentS...

I think you replied to the wrong post.

I meant to correct myself since I could no longer edit.

I'm reasonably certain that this is far more sinister than a simple advertisement tactic. No, dear people, this has all the similarity to Google's 411 service. I have this feeling that Google has implemented some new nifty ML-algorithms and we are giving them the training data. "We" are those people who aren't techy and think 'Sweet, I can classify my email nicely now'.

Sometimes I would really like to switch from Gmail, but I look around at the alternatives and think "do I trust this to be as reliable as Gmail? as stable? as dependable?"

The answer is always no. I hope I'm believing an illusion, but regardless, I still feel like Google's infrastructure is the only one I'd trust with my emails.

Reliability > privacy for me (for now)

Finding something as stable or dependable as gmail isn't the problem (try live.com), but some of it's features is a different story (although not an email feature, live.com's calendar doesn't even have a search feature as far as I know).

It's email, not a Volvo. email is one of the most fault tolerant things on the Internet. Start hosting it yourself. You'll be okay (plus, procmail!).

You'll be okay

Until you realize half your outbound mail isn't getting delivered because the person who had your VPC's IP before you was a spammer, or because you didn't correctly navigate the labyrinth of DKIM, SPF, feedback loops, and arbitrary recipient mail server policies.

Very good points. I use a third party TLS SMTP server for most outgoing stuff.

Realistically, DKIM, SPF, and other overbearing qualifications should only triggered if you're doing mass mailings. Ideally, you shouldn't get denied delivery if you're using an unqualified personal server (that, as you mentioned, hasn't previously been 100% blocked due to bad behavior by anybody in the past ever).

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about it. It shows only when you have chosen your inbox to show different categories. Secondly it shows only in promotional email subscriptions. Not disturbing "Primary tab".

I have four Gmail accounts, and I've indeed seen this, but only two or three times.

Anyone seeing this all the time?

I don't mind.

That's why I switch on iCloud mail!

ah those are under promotions tab anyway, how does this affect?

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