I worked at a place that had many customers who used a major free email provider that also ran an ad network (but was not Google or Microsoft) that kept deciding that most mail we sent to our customers was spam: receipts, installation instructions, responses from support, and notices that subscriptions were going to re-bill were all blocked.<p>We'd contact them, they would fix things, and it would work for a while...but invariably it would go back to classifying it all as spam, and we'd get customers calling to complain about not getting instructions or support responses.<p>Finally, our guy who managed our ad spending called up our rep in ad sales at the email company, and asked in rather forceful terms just why we should continue spending $large_number/month on ads there to acquire new customers, when we were then going to be blocked from emailing those customers?<p>The ad rep conference called in their head of IT, who conference called in their engineer in charge of spam filtering, and had him right there add us to a whitelist that would prevent anything from us being classified as spam no matter what the rest of their spam system decided. As far as I know we never had another email go into the spam filter.<p>If we hadn't been spending a large amount on ads with them, I doubt the problem would ever have been resolved.<p>If you sell a software product to end users, and have non-marketing messages that you need users to see such as responses to support requests or reminders that subscriptions are going to automatically re-bill, I'd recommend including some kind of messaging system specifically for this in the product itself. Still send them as email, but also send them via this in-product channel, or at least send notices that there is a message with links to a way to view it on the web. Email only is simply not reliable enough.
I have a Gmail nightmare story from a couple of years ago.<p>The company I work for was sending confirmation emails doing everything properly: separate IP range mx boxes, warmed up, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, all the bells and whistles. Nothing else was allowed to go through them.<p>Suddenly people weren't getting those confirmation letters. It turned out that soon after Gmail introduced the "Promotions" tab, a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.<p>We tried going through the official channels - once we got to the end of the tunnel, it told us "we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". That's when we started digging into internal google connections across the company, and thank god, we found someone who know someone, and in was sorted within a couple of hours. (It might have helped that the company spends a lot of money on google ads.)<p>Gmail is lovely.
Article admits it isn't a bug then continues calling it a "bug." Also the $187M figure is just pulled out of the air.<p>Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. Users are confused by it, and clicking the oldest password reset link (expired) rather than the newest.<p>Claims that users being unable to reset their passwords costs Expedia $187M.
Many of my customers use Gmail (mostly as part of a company subscription to Apps) and I have frequent problems with their mail getting lost, classified as spam, rejected, filed somewhere, or just difficult to see.<p>I wonder at which point people will start realizing that Gmail is not all it's cracked up to be. Apart from the privacy issues (you basically have to assume that Google is reading all your mail and mining data from it), Gmail treats your mail as their mail: they will do anything they like with it, including hiding it from you.<p>If that sounds like a rant, it is — I am worried about the increasingly centralized nature of E-mail.
Setting aside the validity of the dollar amount, the title belies a dangerous view of product development.<p>In the real world, the buck stops with you. Even if it's not fair, if there's an issue your users are having, you need to fix it.<p>At their scale, there is no excuse for not polishing every minute aspect of the UX, and that it includes how it interacts with every email service.<p>Expedia stole 187m from themselves by not having their shit together.
We've encountered this a lot and when sending emails to organizations that use Google Suite or Gmail. When we explicitly don't want the messages to be grouped our team has began making the subject of the email unique to the request.<p>e.g instead of:<p>Subject:<i>"Password Reset Notification"</i> (or)
Subject:<i>"Website Support Request"</i><p>we'd use:<p>Subject:<i>"Your Password Reset Request - March 14th 10:19am"</i> (and)
Subject:<i>"Website Support Request - Jimmy Davis, Failed Login"</i>
The "fix" for this is actually pretty trivial, and it doesn't require using a unique subject or sender.<p>When you send an email that you don't want to be collapsed into any previous thread on Gmail, include an `X-Entity-Ref-ID` header with a random value.<p>I don't remember where I learned this. I can't seem to find any official documentation mentioning it. But it works.
<i>The issue is impacting all users who forgot their password, use Gmail (not sure about other clients) and don’t notice the hidden messages being at the bottom (it’s really hard to spot).</i><p>So the "bug" is collapsed message/sort/thread view?<p>Feels like this is about as un-bug-like as you can get. Adding the unique Subject: line feels like the right fix (in you) rather than shout at google "you have a bug"
While a whimsical writing and storytelling style sometimes works great, in this case it makes the article very confusing, even contradictory in places.<p>I also find their numbers very hard to believe. Expedia's net income last year was ~$400M. They could apparently make a 60-character fix and increase that by $187M but they don't, because...reasons?
The defense of gmail in the other comments is bizarre. Gmail suffers from a number of similar, very serious usability issues. From the perspective of the user, failing to show the correct password reset email is a bug in gmail that affects many sites.<p>A less advanced non-threaded show-most-recent email view would not suffer from this issue. When you add a more advanced feature, make it the default, and inadvertently reduce usability, you are at fault.
I had never used Gmail until a few month ago when I switched jobs and my current company uses GSuites.<p>The Gmail UI is horrible, the amount of confusion it creates and how illogical it does collapse and order things amazes me. Why not just show me the content as it is and let me figure out how to handle it?
Google should indeed fix every single UX issue, however minor, given its operation scale.<p>That said, such overblown criticisms reminds me of the quote "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses". It's true for everything.
I just want my colorful threading back. Every time someone 'improves' the Gmail UI, it gets harder and harder to use.<p>Back when each new message in a thread had a different-colored header, it was vastly easier to use by skimming.<p>Now, with everything in various shades of monochrome, threads collapsed or expanded, quotes hidden or not hidden, signatures here and there, it's virtually impossible to tell at a glance where one message begin and the other one ends.
All Gmail would have to do to fix the issue is consider the link target when diffing to determine which part is quoted from previous messages.<p>I've noticed this myself on the occasion I end up requesting a password reset multiple times. It's annoying at best to have to click open a closed message and then click again to show the quoted text. I'm sure it took me a minute to figure out what was going on the first time I encountered this.
I opted for one email sent/received, display one line option in Gmail eons ago. The collapsed email format is complete bollocks with one small exception... coming back to work after a vacation. Collapsed view allows for reading a series of emails to acquaint with how a particular subject evolved over time while away.<p>So after vacation > turn collapse back on > clean up vacation built up email > turn collapse off again<p>Edit: oh, I also proactively search for "lost" emails with the following search string:<p>has:nouserlabels -label:inbox -label:drafts<p>With my workflow, I apply a label to everything I want to save when I move it out of the inbox, meaning I've finished dealing with whatever the email requires. So that search string finds whatever has fallen out of my workflow.
...okay, I have a very vague memory of this being straight up announced by Google as a new feature back around 2002-2005.<p>Basically, if I'm remembering right, there was a semi-standard header field in emails that used some sort of hash to identify which email was being replied to. This was how emails were threaded together in other clients, and worked well for the most part.<p>But there were some situations where it didn't work accurately, leaving some emails un-threaded, so Google created its new conversation view to both flatten the reply tree (so you'd see all emails so far before responding, instead of making the same reply as someone else) and group up emails sent from clients that didn't include the hash.<p>And now we're here.
The concept of collapsed email threads is a terrible idea for the typical user. It probably only makes sense for public figures who get a ton of unsolicited emails (whoever designed Gmail must have been a public figure). It also would explain why Marissa Mayer redesigned Yahoo mail to have collapsed email threads by default.<p>The average person doesn't get so many emails that they need to have them collapsed and sorted based on the sender. Most people don't have a problem reading every email in their inbox each day - In fact, that's what they want to do.
"Debugging complete. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.<p>"The direct impact of this bug"<p>"Actually, the bug is still active"<p>So I thought the author realized it was a feature, not a bug. But then the author goes on to claim it's a bug, several times. It's clearly not, it may be a shitty feature but it's not a bug.<p>It took me one instance of this to realize what was going on. Why only one time? Because I took the time to learn how my tools work.
Additionally, the search function doesn't easily surface the most recent messages matching a query. "Gooz Frabba" seems to get me a short list (the first ever mention from years ago; the one where I mentioned it to a friend; etc), followed by a random assortment of messages which don't contain the very latest email I received until I scroll down a screen or few.
I've always felt that gmail is more cumbersome and packed esp in mobile! Inbox was nice in few areas however the core gmail app on mobile is almost impossible to get to a correct mail.<p>Enter Outlook mobile, absolutely love it, no wonder its the most rated mail app in app stores!
tl;dr - Gmail collapses 'threads' of identical messages and you might not see the newest one, and on password reset links (and others) that can be a problem.<p>At Blekko we ran into a variant of this caused all of our regular logging reports to get thrown into a single gmail thread and collapsed (making it hard to find the results) so we changed our logging script to include the date in the subject line.<p>The fix for the author would have been to change the subject to 'change password request received on 14-mar-2019' or something similar (you can include the time too for more uniqueness). Then it always starts a new thread and the messages are always visible.
I have experience this exact issue described in the article so many times. It is so frustrating when trying to reset passwords because other than the time stamp, each email looks identical.
I have had too with some support emails. With Gmail it’s really easy to not see some messages in long threads. Also reading a thread is quite difficult with gmail hiding parts all the time.
It's odd to me that the phrase, "conversation view" is nowhere in the OP and it's literally the name of the feature they're talking about, which can be turned off.
I switched off collapsing Gmail threads, or having them as conversations I believe Google call it. It's quite difficult as I would find myself struggling to find certain emails.
it doesn’t matter if gmail is buggy or whatnot. you have a duty to your clients and shareholders to fix the issue. in most cases this means circumventing an uncontrollable entity. in expedia’s case it means having pseudo-random email formats when requesting a password reset.
as a long time so-called “hacker”, this is junior-level stuff.
very interesting read - for an alternative interface to email, try mutt[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt" rel="nofollow">https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/09/10/gmail-with-mutt</a>
TLDR: Gmail hid the most recent password reset email with a working token link at the bottom due to grouping similar looking emails together. The fix was to introduce a date in the subject line, thus preventing grouping in the first place.<p>Edit: Well, actually it didn't work and it is still an ongoing bug.