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I disabled the promotions tab rather rapidly - it was capturing ticket bookings and other emails that are of immediate importance to me.

Were it to work correctly I don't think it would be causing problems for the typical user and I'm not very sympathetic to the interests of marketers when considering how my inbox should be presented to me.

3 comments

Whenever I turn on a new automated filtering system, I spend time verifying and training it. The tabs have responded very quickly to my recategorizations.

Exactly.

It's possibly a bit disturbing that on hacker news, this thread consists of three people all complaining that, effectively, 'This bayesian filter doesn't quite do exactly what I want out of the box, so it's clearly broken and/or I'm not the target audience for it', instead of acknowledging that bayesian filters aren't psychic, and considering putting in the few seconds per email it takes to train them when they make a mistake.

This isn't Jimmy Growthtard's useless MVP. It's not a stretch to think that Google and their massive, massive, massive set of training data (i.e. everyone's e-mail) should be able to do better out of the box. Not being able to tell the difference between promotions and bank statements or travel bookings is a pretty huge failure to me.

The problem being there's no universal definition of "better". My guess is it's not a matter of "not being able to tell the difference" - it's putting bank statements in 'promotions' because people have been putting their bank statements there. People who want to receive them for their records, but not have them 'in their face' in their primary inbox.

(Should those people have put dragged them to another tab - maybe 'Updates' rather than 'Promotions'? Possibly. If you think so, drag them to there instead. That'll change it for you, and presumably, if enough people do that it'll eventually change the categorisation for everyone who hasn't changed it themselves).

What training data? They've got unlabelled data, not labelled data. Also, all they could provide is really a one-size-fits-all solution, after that it can train to your own needs.

Hold up, you get bank statements by email? Which bank to you use so that I can avoid them completely.

Who knows how it works? How am I supposed to know it's Bayesian? If G's magic works for people then great, but I just want to check my email without going into multiple little hidey-holes. If you're not the sort of person who gets tons of email, the value prop for stuff like this goes way down.

> How are you supposed to know that?

I could be misremembering, but IIRC when the new inbox first appeared it featured a popover over my inbox explaining how to drag and drop a miscategorized email into a different tab to train it.

Then don't activate the feature.

Which would be a fair point if I had turned on an automated filtering system. I didn't want tabs, Google just turned them on for me and the opt-out process is not exactly obvious.

Wow, I had no idea you could do that. Amusingly, you need to click the '+' tab button to remove the tabs. But it is wonderful to get rid of them.

I, too, have had very important ticketing and banking emails filtered into the "Promotions" tab. Good riddance! And thank you.

Same here. Pretty much anything sent via AWeber went into promotions, though I don't consider many newsletters to be a promotion.

It seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions (does no one unsubscribe anymore?). All I really know is that I am not the target audience for the feature.

It seems like the tabs idea is geared more towards individuals that don't manage their email subscriptions

Not all emails are created equally, and thus it is not a binary situation where emails either must all be treated equally, or they shouldn't be received.

I absolutely love the tabs -- my primary email gets better attention than it ever did, while the various promotions and LinkedIn updates, etc, all get the quick browsing periodically.

Honestly I probably pay more attention to the social/update/promotional emails than I ever did -- before I quickly tossed them aside while dealing with real stuff. Now during some downtime I switch on over to the promotional tab and see what deals are afoot, etc.