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Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

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Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the "Promotions" tab, not the primary inbox. Personally, I think there are better reasons to leave Gmail (which is why I did so years ago).

What's a good email provider? I have tens of domains I want to consolidate into a single inbox (and maybe send valid mail from), and Google Apps hasn't been doing a great job with that until now.

I wouldn't know - I run my own server (exim + dovecot + alpine) on a VPS.

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#92
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.roundcube.net/ is generally agreed to be the best webmail system. It's OSS.

I don't know about "generally agreed", but it has been adopted by Kolab and Mountain Lion as their email front-end, which I count as substantial votes of confidence in the product. I'm resistant to adopting this kind of technology: I'm no security guru, but the idea of having Apache/PHP invoking Postfix directly as an executable (i.e., not via SMTP/ whatever) makes me feel nervous.

>I don't know about "generally agreed"

Fair point. Perhaps "often agreed" would be better.

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#94

So this is why they wanted to "help us" sort out our inbox? I feel defrauded into believing their motivation. Like suddenly realizing I was given a lift solely because my presence in the car allowed the driver to enter my estate or place of work. This is wrong.

Twitter ads look like tweets, Facebook ads look like Facebook posts, and of course search ads look like search results, at least in Gmail they have their own designated area.

They replace the webclip ads when the "promotions" tab is enabled: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/ads-in-gmails-promo...

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a slippery slope. They are essentially unsolicited mail that you never asked for. Some people will genuinely use the promotions tab to receive email from companies for which they have requested promotions be sent to them. Google is getting a free ride without permission.

Exactly: "Promotions" is not "Spam". There is already a spam folder, so these should go straight in there, if anywhere. How does this fit in with the CAN-SPAM act? "Unsubscribe compliance A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails. Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days. Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes. " If there is no unsub…

They're adverts presented in the same place you see your e-mails but as they haven't been sent the the way an e-mail is, they won't have used any e-mail protocol, you won't be able to reply to them as e-mails and so on so they aren't e-mails so won't be covered by this.

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#98
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's exactly the reverse. The people who are most bothered by ads are the people to whom the ads provide the lowest value, and are thus the least likely to click them. For example, me.

I tend to agree with this. I rarely, if ever, click on ads because they seem interesting. I mostly see an ad and say "oh that is interesting, I was searching for cars before and now I'm being advertised cars on a music site, how completely useless". The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true value to customers (except for perhaps their 'first page at the top' paid ads, I use them a lot…

>The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true value to customers.

I doubt that adsense has positive overall value to advertisers either. Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising. Some people will be able to make it work but I really don't think it's a large percentage.

According to Wikipedia Google made $42 billion in adwords revenue in 2012. That's like $6 from each person on the planet.

Do adwords really have enough power to increase operating profit by that much?

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#99
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sign up for paid google apps. No ads there what so ever. It's $50 per year.

$50 per year per person. As I run a Google Apps domain for my family, that would be several hundred dollars per year.

Well, that is the rate.

Re: Ads in Gmail displayed as normal emails?

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I've got rid of that (generally I have fewer than half a dozen e-mails in my inbox so tabs were pretty pointless for me) where do they appear? My assumption was in the regular inbox.

Those are clearly "special" emails, so I don't think it can be safely assumed they would be processed the same way as normal emails - it would have to be tested. Personally, I think Google added the Promotions tab exactly because they knew they would get a major backlash against putting ads in the normal inbox.

Interesting. That could mean that this is a stop-gap before ads appear in the main inbox for users who don't use tabs. I expect that would take years though as people would need to be conditioned to the current system first. In any case it feels like a slightly underhanded way to 'subscribe' you to 'mail' you didn't ask for.

I use Gmail over IMAP so no of the web UI stuff they've done has affected me at all (in aggregate, I feel that's worked in my favour).

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