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.
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.
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.
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.
The only way to disable them is to disable the inbox sorting setting (where it sorts primary, promotional, and social). As it is, it only puts adds in the promotional inbox. The worst thing is, i swear it knows where your mouse is and re sorts your emails so an ad lands right below your mouse, increasing the number of ad clicks and the ad revenue. I’ve had this happen to be multiple times.
Yep, first thing I do whenever I add an account to Gmail is disable inbox sorting — presto, zero ads. This has been going on for years, but if OP just made a new Gmail account for the first time since 2013ish, it could be the first time they’ve seen the ads. Feels bad.
If you have a Gmail account with promotional emails, go into your promotional inbox and just mouse around a little bit near the top 10 emails. You’ll most likely see it move the ads around
A email provider shouldn’t require a closed, premium-only, lock-in-required sidecar program just to use IMAP/SMTP. I don’t think the release these bridge apps on BSDs or smaller OSs & you’re forced to use their apps on Android & iOS (no support for KaiOS or other smaller mobile OSs). This should be a giant red flag—kinda like waiving around a Swiss flag as more secure when they will sell you out just as fast as others.
These free-tier-loss-leading strategies are expensive too. If you bump up to premium it’s like $5/mo, but less marketing-heavy options where everyone pays get you all the features–like what I’m using @ 1€/mo.
These free-tier-loss-leading strategies are expensive too.
As a paying PM user, I think it’s fine. I can afford to pay ~$50/year for something as basic as e-mail. Not everyone is as privileged as me though and it’s great that they can have a slightly less featureful version for free.
Privacy in the most basic element of modern communication shouldn’t be reserved for the privileged.
marketing-heavy
Could you point me to the “heavy” advertising? I’ve yet to see any.
I didn’t do more due dilligence than looking at the ProtonMail downloads page + system requirements page—neither of which mentioned source which would instill better trust. So you’ve got me there, but really dumb there isn’t a link.
Open source or not, you still have to use their clients on mobile OSs even if you prefer running a client like K-9 & can’t run on a low-spec OS KaiOS (I suspect the site wouldn’t scale down to this either), etc. Mail protocols are old & should be able to run on a potato without many hoops.
Where I definitely don’t agree tho is the free-tier thing. Having access to the bridge cut off as well as not {Cal,Card}DAV is a real pain that forces the premium subscription, switching providers, or using something like Google for calender/contact defeating much of the purpose. If there was no free tier to subsidize everyone could pay a lot less & get “premium” features others deem as essential. $50 annually is a lot—$12, not so much.
you still have to use their clients on mobile OSs even if you prefer running a client like K-9
If you made K-9 speak their protocol, I’m sure that would work. Additionally, there’s also nothing preventing you from running the bridge on your Android (or whatever) device; it’s a statically linked Go binary.
What your point boils down to is basically that they don’t use or support IMAP. In order for IMAP to work however, the mail server must have access to all of your emails in plain text.
Do you see how that’s an issue when your service is intended to provide privacy to the user? The fact that PM cannot read your emails at rest (even if they wanted to) is one of PM’s explicit selling points. See proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption
This is the primary reason why PM (and Tutanota for that matter) don’t support IMAP. As a software engineer, I can also imagine they wouldn’t want to base their entire operations around such an old and crufty protocol though.
Where I definitely don’t agree tho is the free-tier thing.
That’s fine. I can see both sides. Though, as stated, I’m clearly in the “socialistic” “pay more to support less affluent people” approach to commercial services product camp.
Having access to the bridge cut off as well as not {Cal,Card}DAV is a real pain that forces the premium subscription
For us power users who need that, yes, that’s the point. We should pay.
For your average Joe, they get a fancy web UI calendar and calendar app for free; just like they do with Google but private. I personally find that quite amazing.
If there was no free tier to subsidize everyone could pay a lot less & get “premium” features others deem as essential.
It’s also not altruistic to pay more for to subsidize in the manner you are alluding too since it misses the larger picture of how these wide free tiers have allowed contemporary services to gobble up users to impress investors with growth despite loss-leading products (in code forges look at the publicly-traded GitLab free model vs. SourceHut where everyone pays a small amount to keep servers running (post-beta plan)).
My affordable provider encrypts their servers & the account storage just fine without needing to reinvent the old, tested protocol (might just be a ZFS pool encryption passphrase). But it isn’t security/privacy that’s in question but the accessibility of this standardized protocols with years of tooling built around it & a business model that I don’t think is sustainable.
It’s also not altruistic to pay more for to subsidize in the manner you are alluding too
Whether something is altruistic or not is more of a philosophical debate.
Fact of the matter remains that unprivileged people using PM for free is only possible because us paying users pay at least slightly more. I don’t care whether that’s altruistic or not.
My affordable provider encrypts their servers & the account storage just fine without needing to reinvent the old, tested protocol
That’s nice but that’s just simple disk encryption at rest. That’s not at all comparable to zero-access encryption. Please read the Link in my last reply.
Vouching for FairEmail. It’s by far my favourite mail client. It’s material design and very safe cause it strips out all images by default or only tracking images if you choose.
I don’t understand why there are so many surprised people in this thread. They’ve been doing this for a pretty long time now. Yahoo has been doing it for even longer.
Unless this is just people being fake surprised as a joke?
It sucks that Gmail is pretty much the best app that works with, well… Gmail accounts. At least from what I’ve found. Especially with the 2FA thing where it asks you to press “yes” in Gmail after signing into Gmail from a different browser.
What’s so great about the gmail app (aside from the 2FA thing you mentioned?) Personally, I’m reasonably happy with the iOS mail app (I mean, it’s bad, but it does its job and it doesn’t advertise to me, so I guess that’s a win)… But I guess I do most of my emailing on mu4e.
Nothing really, just the 2FA I find to be really useful and I’m too lazy to switch over my 2FA settings too.
I can’t seem to get the iOS mail app to work for Gmail, it always, and I mean always pushed notifications like a minimum of 30-45 minutes late for important emails. Maybe even longer, and that’s a minimum.
There’s other email clients I’ve wanted to use: outlook was one and spark was the other. I liked outlook, but again the 2FA was important, and Spark felt like it was a tad bit too gimmicky for an email client (having AI to write an email for me, I mean I guess that can be useful but I’d rather take the time to write it myself)
The mail app does not support push notifications for gmail and also does not support IMAP IDLE (my naive understanding is that IDLE keeps a socket open and potentially the radio as a result which would impact battery life), so it fetches emails on a timer. AFAIK the only ways to get push notifications is with iCloud email and with an exchange server. I know you used to be able to set gmail up as an exchange server account on iOS, but I’m not certain if gmail will still pretend to be an exchange server these days. This is probably my biggest complaint with the mail app — like I said, it’s not great :), but it’s good enough for my purposes right now.
That’s fair! :) I feel the same about the Gmail app, it’s not great, but it fits my purposes well enough. I saw the ads OP was talking about, I know I’ve seen them for years by this point, but I never really took notice because they’re so (in my humble opinion) discreet and not really noticeable.
Spark and some more sensible form of 2fa will do. I’ve found Spark superior in every way, what do you prefer about the gmail app? You can use your hardware keys or totp apps with gmail, and it’s much more portable.
It’s mainly due to the lack of knowledge, I don’t know what hardware keys are, nor do I know what a totp app is, so it’s more of a convenience thing for me and not pretending to know what something is or how it works
If you ever feel like looking into totp (time-based one time passwords) some common ones are authy or google authenticator. In case you ever feel the need to start investigating, or some account tells you to use an authenticator like that.
Oh? You can set an Authenticator like Microsoft Authenticator for Gmail accounts? I know about those apps I just didn’t know what totp meant
I think I tried that but it defaulted to Gmail, I keep forgetting how to actually change that, or at least make google keep that setting. It took forever for it to click in how to change login settings from pixel to iPhone (you know the google app popping up with the “press yes to authenticate”
Yep! Sorry for unsolicited acronym, I realize that’s a really annoying thing to get in reply comments.
Any time an app tells you to “use Google authenticator” you can use any authenticator. That QR code they give you to scan for setup can be read by lots of apps. I personally like authy, and it is a very easy cross platform switch when you bounce from android to iPhone or whatever. Keep copies of your backup passwords tho! No matter which app you choose, either print them out or put them in a password manager or whatever Very Secure Method you like.
That being said if you’re happy with your setup that’s awesome and no need to fix what ain’t bugging ya.
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.
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’
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