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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#131

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

Karunamon wrote: post #98
brwnll wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never received data that needed to be displayed as a table? If plain text email was the end-all, then instant messenger and SMS would have killed email a long time ago.

If we're just displaying tables rather than interacting with them, that problem is solved. +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+ | Col1 | Col2 | Col3 | +----------------------------------+---------+------------------------+ | Value 1 | Value 2 | 123 | | Separate | cols | with a tab or 4 spaces | | This is a row with only one cell | | | +----------------------------------+---------+--…

This can't be reflowed to larger or smaller screen sizes.

It also doesn't necessarily work well for non-European languages.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#132

Post by mattm »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #74
soneca wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually sell, as these business don't pay us anything. Rather they list they business on our website to their (and ours) value. Is it still spam? (honest question) Edit: They are a business and have a "contact us" email on their website. Should I really not email them just because im not a customer, but a possible partner?

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative Another way of phrasing your mother's advice: "What if everybody did X?"

This argument never holds up. Being a doctor or an engineer is almost always thought of as a good path. But what if everyone was a doctor or engineer? There'd be no one left to do basic tasks in life and the positions available for doctors and engineers would be so in demand that these people would work for very little.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#133

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

igetspam wrote: post #34

GMail, we need to talk. Thank you for making it complicated for people to send me "rich" text emails. Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function correctly. Perhaps the moving target that are your rendering changes will lead to a simpler, more featureless, email landscape like we once had. I really appreciate the time and money designers are forced to spend on annoying me; if i have to dea…

> Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function correctly.

Thank you Google for protecting my privacy and making spam harder.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#134

Post by fencepost »

gdulli wrote: post #26
rconti wrote: post #23

GMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk about how difficult it is to tell one message f…

Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.

I've long used Latitude/Location History and it's just been getting worse as well. With the newest incarnation ("Timeline") they've made it prettier while breaking it in unfortunate and non-obvious ways.

It's like that person that your tough interview process is designed to weed out - looks good, but when you hire them and put them to work you discover that they can't code, just crib stuff from Stack Overflow and discussion boards.

With "Timeline," you dig in and find things that just don't work right like arrival and departure times (if you're going to show me at a location until 1:30PM why when I go in and drag the slider are there further data points bouncing around that location until 3PM?) and filtering of bad location recording (apparently I make several 1-minute trips a night 1 mile over to a corporate office park nearby with a cell tower).

The previous version was bad (or at least irksome and clearly designed and tested only by people on 4K monitors or with very odd mouse habits for the in-day timeline), but this one is worse because it SEEMS good until you actually look at the data.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#135

Post by spdegabrielle »

Gmail- thanks for the free email service for the past years. I don't mind the pretty minimal advertising you include for a free service. I could run my own mail server, but yours is fine, and let's face it - far better than the email that provided by my ISP. (You would think ISP's would be more motivated to provide a better service with the single feature that is most likely to stop me switching provider.)

Oh- what's that? Do your competitors find it hard to advertise on your platform? That's so sad. I really value the service that email marketers provide.

Thanks again Google,

Your search is still ok - but it is your email account that is good enough to keep me as a customer. An Bing is awful. Except for the arial photos - they are better than the shitty ones on google maps.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#136

Post by manigandham »

makomk wrote: post #125
manigandham wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable. If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

Google has very good geo-IP location detection, almost creepily good in some cases. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results on a desktop browser sometime and see for yourself.

On desktop perhaps but not mobile carrier internet. Those can sometimes show you as a few states away.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#138

Post by Fiahil »

scott_s wrote: post #4

The example presented are the kinds of emails I actively avoid. Perhaps the author is right, and Gmail is not working with them on purpose. If that is the case, it may be because many users are like me, and they tend to not want fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features. The Schema initiative - I didn't know it was called that until now - is in the other direction, and I like it. Emails t…

> Many users are like me, and they tend to not want fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features.

Oh god, yes! I, sometimes, get really offended when people are asking my email for sending the warranty on something I bought in real life. And then, extremely upset when they start sending their colorful marketing prospectus through this address. This inbox (or any other one) is carrying very valuable informations for me to remain organized and accurate; Therefore, it must stay sorted and categorized. I do not have time, nor attention to evaluate your christmas sales on stuffed donkeys.

Enough with the ads, and the blinking shit.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#139

Post by badloginagain »

davidbanham wrote: post #107
badloginagain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing emails are not the only ones that developers want to look not broken. To pick an instance at random: Confirmation emails for purchases made, especially if they have tickets as an attachments. If this email looks broken, customer thinks it's phishing or something, and might end up trashing it, just because styling is not supported consistently. And I take issue with your argument of "marketing emails are bad…

Why is that email using HTML? Hello there! Thanks for purchasing X for $Y. Your tax invoice is attached. Here's where you can track your delivery: http://example.com/tracking Thanks!

Such a minimalist design may work for some products/brands. But just as many companies, especially companies that put a lot of focus on brand management, may want nice images and responsive design. It's not an unreasonable request.

Even if it's not as effective for click-through/customer re-engagement/etc. you should let the customer decide on what kind of emails they want. Data will prove if nice images and ads are less effective than simple HTML. Gmail shouldn't be forcing that decision, it should be empowering the greatest number of people to do the most amount of things.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#140

Post by kevinchen »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

Maybe I am just really, really old at this point, but sending emails in plain text solves all these problems. I don't think I've ever received an HTML email that couldn't have been adequately represented in plain text and maybe an attached image if necessary.

…except Gmail doesn't support plain-text email well either. They've been converting plaintext quotes to literal '>' characters for at least 3 years and counting:

https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/gm...

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