Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.
These ads only appear in the “promotions” section of Gmail, the section that is by definition for advertising emails. It’s not great, but this is the least intrusive place to put ads.
Whoa, there’s remotely tech-savvy people who don’t turn off 100% of that “new” inbox sorting stuff? Color me surprised.
That Social/Updates/Promotion shit is absolutely trash shit garbage useless. It does nothing to improve email experience. It exists to serve you ads.
As someone who enjoyed Google Inbox before they killed it, it hurts to read this comment.
I loved Inbox. I hate everything that was supposed to replace it. Spark isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s not nearly as smart. Shortwave may be ok but my only IOS device isn’t set up to receive email and I haven’t bothered to try it since the Android app is new. Gmail is terrible. Outlook is Outlook.
Inbox worked in a way that my brain immediately understood and adapted to.
I used Inbox too, and also liked it.
But these gmail features aren’t remotely like inbox. They hide the emails behind alternate tabs. Ones you cannot configure yourself. With nearly no indication instead of putting them front and center (but grouped together). They make it harder to see and understand your inbox instead of easier. This post being a perfect example – tons of people didn’t even understand what was going on because of how awful the feature is.
Inbox was killed and its main features lost with it. They were not folded into gmail.
What I do is I create rules with which I tag emails and auto archive them. This moves them to “folders” in a way I decide and removes them from the inbox. They all are still in the all mail tab.
I also archive all the mail after processing it so that “clear the inbox” feeling that Inbox had is not lost.
I still prefer Inbox to Gmail but I emulated all the features I used.
I didn’t even try it because I knew Google would kill it later like other products.
That’s weird, I feel like it does improve my experience. I like how it categorizes my emails.
Yeah, there’s like three tabs there I don’t need to look at.
You can turn on and off tabs. But if you turn them on, you’re going to get ads.
I’ve been getting these ads for months now, and am slowly working on moving to proton/k9. I imgine it’s going to suck getting similar filters set up for my mail, though.
2023 is easily the worst year in the history of the internet, every big company can go fuck itself imo
Never noticed an ad in the Primary tab. They appear in the others. I genuinely never look there as it’s just three extra tabs of spam I don’t need to see.
If any of my wanted email is there, I guess I’ll see it when I use the search function. That also doesn’t have ads. So far.
Shit I was confused I’ve never seen this, but I assume I am have all that turned off. Still moving away from gmail though. Protonmail, mentioned by someone else, is what im using, but I think having your own domain and just having someone host the data is probably the best bet
I agree with you 100%. That’s what I did. Registered a domain for 10 years, and use the free version of Zoho mail. It may or may not be enough, depending on if you regularly clean your emails or not, since each of the allowed 5 users gets only 5GB of storage space. There are plenty of alternatives out there to do this, all of them with their pros and cons.
Are you kidding? It filters out 90% of my inbox so I don’t have to look at it, but keeps it available for me in case I want it later. It’s one of my favorite features Gmail.
I’ve still been using the HTML version on desktop. I just got a notice that it’ll be discontinued come 2024. It’s actually a nice nudge to de Gmail myself.
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Yep. It’s always the first thing I do with all new gmail accounts. It’s garbage.
Gmail has had ads for at least a decade.
They’ve only recently started making the ads look like unread emails to try to trick you into clicking them.
Nah they been doing that for years too.
Outlook been doing it awhile, so cheap and shitty.
Ublock origin
That’s not an option for the mobile app.
k9 mail
Been noticing it at least for the past couple years.
Not saying its new. Just was surprised. They probably don’t make much from it. Why put it in for a couple pennies (on a corporate level). I didn’t think they were that greedy. I honestly hadn’t seen this before because I rarely use gmail and have never used the promotions tab.
A couple of pennies time a Billion users is a lot of pennies.
It is probably way less than a penny per user per day.
We learned this from meta didn’t we? A user is worth about $15 a month?
No we didn’t. We learned they were required to offer an ‘ad tracking free’ experience and that they priced it at $15/month. As that experience only exists as a result of a law suit - we have no idea what a user is worth.
Because they were limited by what they could charge to ‘sounds reasonable’ and ‘unlikely to cause further lawsuits’
I don’t even know if this is true, but I’d love to know more.
Maybe we’re worth £4 a month, but they just decided to pull a higher price out of their ass to dissuade everyone from paying.
I suspect the small amount of people who decide to pay will cost more in infrastructure, and causes more headaches to meta anyway.
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They’re saying it’s a little late to be shocked. Obviously.
It’s been like that for a long time.
It’s definitely getting far worse lately. It used to only be in promotions but now I’m seeing it in updates too. In promotions it’s about 1 ad to every 2-3 emails now when it used to be 1-2 at the top and that’s it
Maybe I’m missing something, but hasn’t this been the case since forever?
I mean, Google is an advertising company. I would be surprised if they didn’t serve ads in their free email service.
I’ve never in my life seen an ad in Gmail mobile app in-line as though it were something in your inbox. I get really frustrated at the indignance over “ad company does ads and you’re mad” as if there’s not a difference when things get escalated.
It’s under the promotions tab. Been that way for a while. I just don’t use that tab myself so I don’t see it often.
While you are correct, the sheer amount these past few weeks, for me at least, is staggering
They’ve been picking up the density, for sure. I think adblock has also frequently worked on the webUI if you’ve used firefox, i’m not sure if they’ve updated it to get around ublock.
FAANG and the other high-cap tech companies have been cashing in on their market dominance these last few quarters - they’re all getting bad. That’s not a good sign if you’re an average joe; it means you’ll be bombarded with tracking and ads (even more than now) AND I think it’s a bad sign for market stability. People have been predicting another recession for a while, but that signal is getting louder I think.
They started putting ads in the mobile app a while ago. I think I first noticed a couple years ago? I had been using Inbox until that got shut down, then used the web UI for the most part. I’ve tried a few other app options, but the only one I like is $10/mo just for the UI. Not even a full email address, just a UI for Gmail.
I switched to spark when inbox got decomed works well for me. I’m sure they also sell my data but so did google
Literally since the beginning AFAIK. Although they allegedly stopped scanning e-mails for targeted ad data years back: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-to-stop-scanning-gmail-messages-to-serve-up-ads
I don’t recall seeing ads in the phone app, however, just the webapp, so perhaps that is new? Which makes some kind of dark sense given less people use computers to do things anymore, and every tech company is trying to pull off increasingly maximum grift over the last few years.
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were these not always in gmail?
Yes. They have always been a part of Gmail. Even back when Gmail was invite only they implemented ads (one of my accounts is from 2004).
They used to be off to the side, not disguised to look like unread emails.
I’ve never seen them and have been using it for close to 20 years now
They only show up if you use the tabs. And then I think they are only in Promotions.
oh right that’s a cursed function anyways
I was wondering what people were talking about! Thank you!
I too, have never seen these before in my life, and I also don’t like tabs. I turn them off for everyone I can, too. I had no idea I was also turning off these ads. Nice.
Yes they’ve always been a thing in the promotions/else tabs, anyone who says they aren’t around simply hasn’t clicked those tabs or registered they existed (in fairness, everything in that tab is generally an ad)
IDK cause I use Adguard DNS and the DDG app. I never see ads anywhere
They have been for years now.
Wait until you see Yahoo mail.
Edit: Before you say nobody uses Yahoo mail, it’s probably the 2nd most used after gmail at my school, afaik, I haven’t met another person using protonmail.
Do you go to school in 1998?
I have Yahoo mail. And it’s just occasionally 1 ad email that’s clearly labeled ad, not greyed out, and maybe a banner. I’ve had nothing too intrusive once it switched. But it gave me a monthly option. Idk, as much as I hate ads, it’s not that bad.
I don’t recall how many ads yahoomail has, but, it’s in a spot that when you first open your inbox, it could be mistaken for an actual email.
I’ve seen way too many Yahoo and Hotmail emails this year. I’ll send someone a message asking for their email (for business) and they come back with either of those two…
Or even Hotmail
That’s the problem! If you’re ready to adopt protonmail, but no one in your social group is, what to do with an empty inbox?
What are you talking about? ProtonMail is still a regular fully functional email provider. Nobody else has to use ProtonMail for you to receive the same emails you would on gmail.
alwayshasbeen.jpg
Yes it is. It is malware at this point. (It’s trying to trick you into clicking ads.) If I can invite you to try Port87, it’s an email service that I wrote that does the opposite. (Keeps spam out of your inbox, rather than inserting spam into it.)
Full disclosure: I developed and run Port87, and as such, have a financial interest in it.
Sounds like an amazing system, read the about page. If I wasn’t broke and already migrated to free-tier proton services I’d definitely be in.
Yo!! I think I met you at a convention in San Francisco on Easter weekend this year (or was it last year?)! I’m glad to see this taking off!!
Oh awesome! I’ll send you a DM. :)
Isn’t that labels thing the same as using the + in Gmail? You can use myname+spam@gmail.com to register somewhere, and if you receive anything else on that email address you’ll know they shared your email address.
no, it is similar but not the same.
Kind of. It’s called tagged addressing or subaddressing, and the fact that you can do that with both services is where the similarities end. With Gmail, it’s just another address that goes to your inbox. With Port87, whatever you put after the dash or plus sign is the label it goes to in your account. That way, it’s automatically organized for you. And you can make a label screen senders before their email is delivered. That way, a label that’s meant for people, like “yourname-friends@port87.com” will only get emails from real people.
Nice work! Quick typo on your website - should be, ‘anything you can imagine’, not ‘anything you can image’.
Fixed!
Fast! Page isn’t loading for me now in Chrome or FF (loads but the scroll will not).
Thanks! This is fixed now. That’s the danger of the app’s CSS needing the page not to scroll, but the website’s CSS needing the opposite.
Perfect :)
Oh wow. Thank you.
Don’t worry, they’re also selling your data on top of that
Well duh.
They’re selling your data to these companies, so that they can then sell them the ad spot.
They’ll also sell them access to the analytics around the ad campaign.
It’s only in the promotions inbox, which if Gmail is sorting correctly is just full of commercial spam anyways. Doesn’t really impact the experience for me since I rarely ever check it
Turn off your promotions inbox and only have a main inbox and you don’t get ads
LOL, I’ve had that buried for so long I had to hunt for it to see what OP was talking about. Talk about a non-issue.
They definitely started putting them in all inboxes for the mobile app, I turned off the split inboxes when it happened, could have been A/B testing or something like that. I looked at degoogling myself straight after that, spent hours reading and planning and looking through options, then realized that any solution options would not work for the rest of my family and now just stare into the pit of despair that is our dystopian reality. Might check out how proton is doing now though.
Y’all they have been doing this for literally years. Don’t act surprised it’s not fucking new.
If the service is free, you are the product. It’s not complicated.
Pay for email, get no ads.
That statement just makes all of FOSS sound bad, and then people have even less of an idea what alternatives they could be using
Mailbox.org is 1€ / month for 2GB with first month free (with limitations), I don’t think it’s too much to ask for because Google has other ways of making money.
If you are self hosting, you are still paying in your time to set up, host and manage it.
And with FOSS, you are still the product. You are providing bug testing, there are no guarantees, and the idea is you contribute back by investigating bugs you find and submit them to the project.
The saying still has a very negative connotation, that’s all I’m saying
So many paid products are buggy, get EOL with some small notice, or pad their bottom line selling user data.
At least with FOSS you have the option of picking up maintenance yourself if the corp drops that product. Support for mission critical infrastructure will only last as long as your support contract with closed software.
That’s a huge risk.
Oh yeh. I know a few companies stung by this!
I disagree that the users are the product with FOSS is what I was getting at. Major contributions being done by individuals is a special case, with little regard for business continuity. There are obvious examples of people that do it, but the real value regardless of the quality of the individual contributors is the ability to fork your own if the contributions stop aligning with your business plan.
That ability to bring the software in house is a guarantee.
I’m just over here using mutt in my terminal and sipping my tea.
Try aerc! I sip my coffee even more happily nowadays :)
There’s no such thing as a FOSS service. The software they use might be FOSS but a service cannot be.
There are free services that are genuinely free but they have nothing to do with FOSS.
Ok, so what do you call Bitwarden, matrix, openstreetmaps, Mastodon, or Lemmy?
OSM is database
The code? Free and Open Source Software.
An instance of the software running as a service? A service.
The official Bitwarden service has a free and a more featureful paid tier.
Element offers paid hosting as a service with a limited free tier.
OSM isn’t software?
Mastodon and Lemmy are hosted and financed by individuals or organisations who usually choose to offer their service free of charge.All of these are FOSS underneath but have very different costs. There is a difference between commercial for-profit services (BW, Element) and non-profit/public benefit ones (Lemmy, Mastodon) with the latter usually being free of charge.
There’s very little difference between a commercial FOSS application as a service and a commercial non-free software as a service.
For example, you could also buy Slack as a service as opposed to Element. In the end it’s a bill of $x/user/month. Nothing “free” about that other than the hosted software’s source code.The free in FOSS doesn’t mean free of charge. All those paid services are still FOSS.
That doesn’t change the fact that they’re services, not software. These are fundamentally different things.
No, they’re not mutually exclusive. These services are software.
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Advertising company puts adverts in one of few products they didn’t shutter two years in.
Years ago.
More at 11.
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well
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