GMail: The Backlash?

The way the official, promoted ads in my 'Promotions' tabs jump around about 2-5 seconds after I open the tab, ensuring I click on an ad instead of the actual email I want to open, is driving me bonkers. Even knowing it's coming and waiting a few extra seconds only works about half the time, they seem to have learned just how to time them.

Extra annoying that these two promoted ads are no longer consistently at the top of the page, easy to ignore.

gmail is trash

I used to like it. As I complained in another thread the search function is terrible, and Google’s core business is a search engine!

Use Fastmail (affiliate link) (https://fastmail.com <- not an affiliate link)

fastmail security supposed to be a bit shit? (full disclosure: i use fastmail for personal non spam email because i like it and don’t care)

have never heard that nor do I know what you might be referring to

have had no issues re gmail or search.
in fact, i have no 'promotions' tab !?

have never heard that nor do I know what you might be referring to

have had no issues re gmail or search.
in fact, i have no 'promotions' tab !?

Oh I mean in practice most email you send will be TLS encrypted between servers and if you use any email provider you’re kind of trusting your provider to not read your email no matter what, nothing special about Fastmail there. Also I’m sure their infra is deployed worldwide now the internet isn’t good enough in Australia to run a service from there I’m pretty sure

My impression of Australia is the whole country is sharing one asymmetric DSL connection that goes to Singapore and they each pay $89 a month for it

xxpost - I don't know if it was something with my settings, but several years ago my Gmail started appearing pre-screened into three tabs at the top - Primary, Promotions and Social. For the most part it does a pretty good job of sorting my incoming mail into the appropriate tabs, although I have had to do a little "training" for newsletters and such. I'm sure there's some setting for this, but I'm actually okay with it and I didn't do anything intentional to set up these tabs, they just showed up. The Promotions tab is the only one that had the embedded ads.

that sounds like a nightmare to me. if gmail had any advertising at all i would be gone immediately.

Yeah I've had the tab setup on the browser gmail for a few years, it happened automatically. Yes it has embedded ads but it also segregates useless promotional emails with a pretty high degree of accuracy (I also train it sometimes). Makes gmail an better experience overall, most days I don't even open the Promotions tab. In the app version, I use the Primary view, where Promotions is not a tab but they show up grouped together at the top of my email, which is slightly more annoying than the browser version

I have several Gmail accounts and only one of them has that "promotions" tab and only one or two emails ever get sent there. Usually they're notifications from Zoom or something stupid like that.

I think they offered me the promotions 'upgrade' a couple of years ago, I declined and they haven't asked me since.

The Promotions tab is great. Filters out all the offer emails from companies you've purchased from in the past etc

Very easy to quickly scan through the list to see if there's anything of interest and then bulk delete them.

It's fine, I'm sure it could be better but it's just frickin email and I don't care enough to change, though I'm sure there are better alternatives

it's super easy to customize / remove the tabs in gmail!

The Promotions tab is great. Filters out all the offer emails from companies you've purchased from in the past etc

Very easy to quickly scan through the list to see if there's anything of interest and then bulk delete them.

exactly! Recently I had to go through a bunch of emails on an old work computer where I was using MS Outlook (ah the days of configuring POP3 settings ...) and realized that having to sort through a bunch of promotional email from like Office Depot and gig announcements for concerts in places I will never go ... that used to be a major part of "my email lyfe" and now ... promotions tab + forums tab -- not any more.

Also! Also! being able to have multiple gmail account inboxes show in the app ... I think that was my technology excitement of the month when I figured that out tbh