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Is Google Playing Fair With Groupon, et al?

Posted by timothy on from the maybe-there's-a-perfectly-reasonable-explanation dept.

An anonymous reader writes with the claim (illustrated with what seems like damning screen-shot evidence) that "Google is using Gmail's priority inbox to give special treatment to its own daily deal emails over all the rest."

5 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just a thought by liquidweaver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FYI, he is censoring his blog. I asked the same question there, and it's been magically erased.

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    mov ah, 4ch
    int 21h
  2. Because you already read messages from Google? by Meshach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder if that message is marked as important because you read the other message from Google (the Welcome message)? I can only assume that messages are marked important / non-important based on your reading habits and with so little to go on maybe that is all it takes for GMail to consider the message "Important"?

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    "Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
    Aldous Huxley
    1. Re:Because you already read messages from Google? by black3d · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Interesting.. I posted a comment pointing out that the service agreement says he'll get Google mails as priority messages and that he can opt-out of them, and after it was up for a few minutes, he deleted the comment.

      So pretty much, it is as above. He signed up for a service which says he'll get priority Google emails by default when activated, and then starts complaining that exactly that is happening. What a douche.

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      "The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
  3. Re:Just a thought by edumacator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He also has a grand total of one blog post.

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    An important change for education.
  4. Re:Non-story by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Priority inbox doesn't work like that. It looks at what emails have been read immediately and responded to quickly in the past to try and predict how important new emails are. If you immediately open Google's mails it will think they are important to you and put them in the priority category. If you do the same with Groupon they will end up in there too.

    It is the opposite of spam filtering and uses the same techniques. Instead of deciding what is crap it decides what is important.

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    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC