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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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