I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail".<p>Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction.<p>Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").
I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero.<p>Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started out as.
They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads.<p>From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something. (which is almost all the time)<p>The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not. That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email...<p>edit: I a word.
Would you please leave my email alone. there are already 1000 and 1 distractions in my life over the internet.<p>by the way what is the price tag of Gmail. If I ever get rich I would buy it and let it be what it is. an email service.
This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.altomail.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.altomail.com</a>
The promotion tab does not work for me. A lot of my emails are miscategorized into it. E.g. monitoring emails.<p>A flexible tab system would be really great. The Google machine learning approach does not work for me.<p>Am I the only that experience this issues?
I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate.<p>I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.
My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits back?