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.
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've never seen a marketer verify email to make sure it was actually the requester who owns the email like other web services do.
I've got a large and growing procmail list of complete idiots (yep, shell mail on a private box).
So drag them back into the main folder. I did. Works great.
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.
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 want to decide what emails go into the tabs not an algorithm.