Gmail Overhaul Has Marketers Saying 'Ack' | Hacker News Reader

Gmail Overhaul Has Marketers Saying 'Ack'

online.wsj.com

46 pointsadidash98 comments

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.

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.

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.

I think you are reducing this too much. It is not just a matter of whether I want email from a company or not. Just because I want email from them doesn't necessarily mean I _always_ want to read _everything_ they send me. Neither does it mean that I want to unsubscribe if they send me "too much," because "too much" is a function of how busy I am on a particular day, as well as how many unread emails I have that day. Having Gmail put these emails in their own tab means I don't have to explicitly add them all to a specific filter.

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.

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".

Key word: "almost".

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

> Patio11's emails, which I signed up for and love reading, end up in the promotions tab.

So drag them back into the main folder. I did. Works great.

In a previous world you could use 1 email for personal and 1 email for everything else. Unfortunately websites & apps harvesting users address books has ruined that.

I don't know...I disabled the new tabs actually. Mainly because I HATE that some of my emails are hidden behind other tabs.

I personally love how well Gmail implemented the "important" tags, and I use four inboxes one page: "Important and Unread", "(Other) Unread", "Starred", and "Everything else" (in the inbox). This configuration most importantly lets Gmail intelligently decide mail that's important and not, without me having to re-train Google.

The promotions tab I would say makes me more likely to view your e-mail. When it was all just cluttering up my inbox before I would usually just scan past them and delete. Now I go and look through them and see if anything interests me.

The only problems is that when they first implemented this feature I was missing a lot of important emails from my bank and Amazon. I dont like having to browse to a new tab too see emails that are coming into the same inbox.

I want to decide what emails go into the tabs not an algorithm.

you can decide, you just have to train gmail a little. When you drag an email into a new tab it'll ask if you want all email in the future to go into that tab.

I love the promotions tab.

OTOH, I hate it. IF Google could actually read my mind and know exactly what I do and don't want in "promotions" vs. "inbox" it might have some value. But they frequently mis-classify messages, at a rate that makes it useless to me.

And yeah, I know you can manually tune it, but that feels like more work than just doing what I do now - let everything go to my inbox.

shrug

I love it too. I actually just installed the gmail app on my iPhone so I could get email sorted into those promotions and social tabs on my phone.

It does make scanning those emails much more efficient. Also, some emails I promote to my main tab...Humble Bundle for example. I bet tools to let marketers know that I did that would be valuable to them.

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.

And in the end the Yellow Pages wins, paid placements beats out quality of result.

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

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

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)

I think that's a fair trade off.

That's not the way Google works at all. The entire basis of Google's offerings is that they want to give you the most relevant search results possible, along with relevant ads. If they cease giving you the best search results possible, they know that it opens them up to competitor providing a better product.

The far more likely scenario is that the car will direct you to the nearest supermarket, but also recommend a couple of shops nearby or on the way that it thinks you might be interested in. If they direct you to a "theater 25 miles away", then they know full well that someone else will come in and provide a better search product - in the long term they lose.

There may be privacy issues with Google, there may be issues with the prominence of ads, but claims that they don't provide good search results are completely missing the point.

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/...

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.

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.

Same here. Pretty much anything sent via AWeber went into promotions, though I don't consider many newsletters to be a promotion.

It seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions (does no one unsubscribe anymore?). All I really know is that I am not the target audience for the feature.

It seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions

Not all emails are created equally, and thus it is not a binary situation where emails either must all be treated equally, or they shouldn't be received.

I absolutely love the tabs -- my primary email gets better attention than it ever did, while the various promotions and LinkedIn updates, etc, all get the quick browsing periodically.

Honestly I probably pay more attention to the social/update/promotional emails than I ever did -- before I quickly tossed them aside while dealing with real stuff. Now during some downtime I switch on over to the promotional tab and see what deals are afoot, etc.

Wow, I had no idea you could do that. Amusingly, you need to click the '+' tab button to remove the tabs. But it is wonderful to get rid of them.

I, too, have had very important ticketing and banking emails filtered into the "Promotions" tab. Good riddance! And thank you.

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.

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.

Who knows how it works? How am I supposed to know it's Bayesian? If G's magic works for people then great, but I just want to check my email without going into multiple little hidey-holes. If you're not the sort of person who gets tons of email, the value prop for stuff like this goes way down.

> How are you supposed to know that?

I could be misremembering, but IIRC when the new inbox first appeared it featured a popover over my inbox explaining how to drag and drop a miscategorized email into a different tab to train it.

Then don't activate the feature.

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.

What training data? They've got unlabelled data, not labelled data. Also, all they could provide is really a one-size-fits-all solution, after that it can train to your own needs.

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).

Hold up, you get bank statements by email? Which bank to you use so that I can avoid them completely.

Which would be a fair point if I had turned on an automated filtering system. I didn't want tabs, Google just turned them on for me and the opt-out process is not exactly obvious.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The default is no images, and users are given a choice to display images for one email only, or for all emails from a sender.

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

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...

Actually a pretty clever compromise, IMHO.

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

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

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.

Indeed. Images can be attached to the emails, and the show remote images button (or whatever it's called) simply loads all images. There should be options to display attached images, remote images from sender's domain, etc.

If you allow to display images from senders domain it can still be tracked. Just a minor shift in the industry will overcome this.

Yes, but from my experience a vast majority of.. email marketers won't figure out how to do it. I would really like the option to only display attached images.

GMail does a pretty good job at blocking trackers. However, this is not enough to prevent users from triggering the tracking themselves.

As gyardley says, there's the option to enable images. I rarely enable them, but sometimes I decide that I gain more from seeing them than from avoiding the tracking.

Another mechanism is links: clicking on one will get you tracked too. Normally, if there's something that catches my eye I look it up on Google instead of clicking on the link. But sometimes I either don't care or don't see a benefit to do it.

Now, the above is my behaviour, which is that of a paranoid, tech-savvy, power user who, for example, wasn't surprised in the slightest when the whole Edward Snowden story came about. Think of how a normal user will behave instead.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know what the OP meant but to me standard client means using IMAP/POP protocol as opposed to the official Google apps.

@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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

That's actually really messed-up. For normal Gmail, that seems very reasonable and convenient - present ads when I, as a user, indicate I'm looking for deals.

With Google Apps, the assumption should be that this is a work email and deal hunting is not part of the normal job.

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

Free Google Apps accounts have ads.

So do the $5 per person per month accounts, apparently.

Ah, I was under the impression they had deprecated those

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

If you receive ads in a paid GAPPS account is because your administrator has turned on ads

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.

"Google's inbox is Good for the internet consumers"

Isn't that good enough?

Good luck finding a solution where everyone wins.

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

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

Like Adwords?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.

Thats an interesting point. I would have liked if Google allowed me create custom tabs using filters.

You can assign labels based on filters already, the only difference is that you access labels on the left side, and tabs at the top.

Did you try disabling the tabs other than primary?

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

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?

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).

You can opt out. Gear -> Configure Inbox. Or click the + button at the end of the tabs and disable all but Primary.

You can also try dragging emails from one tab to the tab you think fits better and train it. I mean, most of this was explained in the modal they showed you when it went live.

I personally like the Promotions tab because now all my LivingSocial/Groupon deals go there and with a quick scan I can decide if any are worth my time. If not, Select All -> Delete. Much nicer than when they hit my Inbox causing me to check to see if the new mail I got was something important or just a new deal I likely don't care about.

'Syn'

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.

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

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