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.
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’
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.
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 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.
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
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)
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.
Isn’t that labels thing the same as using the + in Gmail? You can use [email protected] to register somewhere, and if you receive anything else on that email address you’ll know they shared your email address.
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 “[email protected]” will only get emails from real people.
Like going to a shopping centre and complaining the stores have ads in front of their stores. There’s legitimate concerns about Google and then there’s just dumb users.
The promotion tabs is your actual emails, just labeled by Gmail as “promotion”. And then there is ads adding to your emails. If you do not open emails in this tab, it’s time to do some cleaning friend, and unsubscribe from a bunch of things
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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 software is the “primary component” but a service is far more than just a piece of software.
It’s providing infrastructure for the software to run in, maintaining said infrastructure, providing support to customers, billing/accounting, hiring people to do all of that etc. I’d even go as far as saying that the software being hosted ifself plays no major role in the service part.
Sure, but that’s exactly what people mean when they say FOSS service.
Regardless, that’s not the discussion we’re having. The point is that those services are free of charge, and you’re not the product. And that a big reason for that is that they are FOSS services.
Arguing about what people mean is futile. The point the other poster is making, and you’ve now agreed to be true, is that FOSS is software and a service is a service.
Most services powered by FOSS offer a free service as a taster for the paid service. The money made in the paid service tiers pay for the free tiers. Hopefully.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn’t that done for a while by google? But yes - i think ive seen it as well and it’s pathetic. I believe u might be able to disable those in gmail settings.
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