I love the promotions tab. It keeps my inbox much cleaner and much easier to clean up. I browse the promotions tab, look for emails that I'm interested in reading, and "check unread" - "delete" the rest. Combined with the Disconnect and Ad Block Edge plugins, I see no ads either.
As I have said in past threads about marketers who assume their promotional messages are anywhere near as important to me as personal email from friends... "fuck you" (the marketers, not jstalin)
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.
I think you are reducing this too much. It is not just a matter of whether I want email from a company or not. Just because I want email from them doesn't necessarily mean I _always_ want to read _everything_ they send me. Neither does it mean that I want to unsubscribe if they send me "too much," because "too much" is a function of how busy I am on a particular day, as well as how many unread emails I have that day. Having Gmail put these emails in their own tab means I don't have to explicitly add them all to a specific filter.
I have had a problem where people sign up for stuff using my email address. Yes I can (and do) unsubscribe, but it is really nice that these are now pretty much all filtered out of my inbox automatically.
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.
Almost all the big email marketing software sends you an email after sign up to verify you want to receive emails from them. It's called "double opt-in".
In a previous world you could use 1 email for personal and 1 email for everything else. Unfortunately websites & apps harvesting users address books has ruined that.
I don't know...I disabled the new tabs actually. Mainly because I HATE that some of my emails are hidden behind other tabs.
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.
The promotions tab I would say makes me more likely to view your e-mail. When it was all just cluttering up my inbox before I would usually just scan past them and delete. Now I go and look through them and see if anything interests me.
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.
The only problems is that when they first implemented this feature I was missing a lot of important emails from my bank and Amazon. I dont like having to browse to a new tab too see emails that are coming into the same inbox.
I want to decide what emails go into the tabs not an algorithm.
you can decide, you just have to train gmail a little. When you drag an email into a new tab it'll ask if you want all email in the future to go into that tab.
It does make scanning those emails much more efficient. Also, some emails I promote to my main tab...Humble Bundle for example. I bet tools to let marketers know that I did that would be valuable to them.
