It comes off as something being masked as a "feature," when in actuality it is just something that is trying to get me to spend money. It seems like it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising.
> it blurs the line between the "content" of my inbox and advertising
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...)
I'm sorry, but this blog post is suggesting I should have a big shiny button at the top of my email inbox that will show me "Promotions" from Google Offers and Zagat (also owned by Google). That rubs me the wrong way.
> a big shiny button... that will show me "Promotions" from Google Offers and Zagat
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...
I think you misunderstand what that tab is for. It's not a place for Google advertising; it's a place where promotional emails from any site are automatically sorted into - to keep them separate from other useful email. E.g. a clothing website that sends emails about weekly sales - that'll end up under Promotional.
Ok, I see what you're saying. I guess that pic just comes off as being in poor taste in this post then. Because, in reality, those are not the tabs normal people would set up. So I began to question what the point of the feature was. Is it really to help me organize my inbox? Or is it for Google to show me things they want me to spend money on?
Yes, I would like to keep them separate, but I would not like to have a big prominent link to them at the top of my inbox. See the labels listed in the mobile app screenshot ("Family," "Fun," "School")? I (and most other people, I would think) would much sooner like to have big buttons to those things at the top of my inbox. Not "Promotions."
I think you under-estimate how much people care about these types of e-mails. At work we manage the mailing list for a big restaurant chain. Their "active users" subset of their mailing list makes up about 1/3 of the total, and that 1/3 opens 40% of the promotional e-mails they are sent within 2 days. For a lot of people "Promotions" e-mails both represents a leisure activity (hunting for bargains), and social activities (lunch with colleagues, dinner with friends, evening at the theatre etc.).
> It comes off as something being masked as a "feature," when in actuality it is just something that is trying to get me to spend money.
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.)
I suppose. But the weird aspect here is the prominence of the button. The point of filtering out spam (given the more pleasant name "Promotions" now) is to put it into a place where it won't bother me. Now, they're suggesting I have a big fancy "Promotions" button at the top of my inbox. Why would I want that button there?
> But the weird aspect here is the prominence of the button.
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".
If you're saying what I think you're saying, I think you've misunderstood: if this feature is like their current Labs offering, the "Promotions" label is applied to your incoming mail that is best classified as a "Promotion", such as any promotional email from sites you shop at - it's not additional content that Gmail is feeding you. If you don't have any such email, I suspect this category would simply be empty for you.
