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Google Rolling Out Gmail Redesign
Today Google announced a redesign of the Gmail inbox. Citing a high volume of email which makes it hard for users to focus on what's important (or what they want to focus on at any given moment), the new inbox will automatically group incoming emails into categories, which will appear as tabs at the top of the inbox. 'You can easily customize the new inbox — select the tabs you want from all five to none, drag-and-drop to move messages between tabs, set certain senders to always appear in a particular tab and star messages so that they also appear in the Primary tab.' Speaking to The Verge, Gmail product manager Alex Gawley said, 'It became obvious to us over time that this notion that the inbox was more of your master than your servant was becoming more widespread. It wasn't just the people receiving hundreds of emails a day — more regular users were starting to feel stressed out by their inbox.' The announcement notes that if you aren't interested in the new view, you can switch off all the tabs to go back to the classic inbox view.
So what's the best alternative to gmail thse days?
"We're Google and we can do whatever the fuck we want because we're so cool and if you don't like it you'll just have to suck it up and deal."
That's how they currently approach every product. And when I say every product, I mean every product. They're not even trying to compete anymore.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
You got it. It's designer-driven change for change's sake. The same problem as Gnome with Gnome3 and the same problem that MS have with Windows 8. Changes that nobody wants or needs - except bored designers.
Change for change's sake? I don't think Google is as mindless as that.
A list of emails that a person gets only says so much about the person. You don't quite control what other people are sending you - they do. On the other hand the way that you interact with your email and how you categorize and prioritize it (did you find that "mark as important" feature useful?) tells so much more about you.
Of course that feature is there only to alleviate the stress from you and stop the inbox from being your master, nothing more.
There's actually a lot of room for improvement with email. It's one of the more clunky and archaic parts of the web and I'm really glad Google keeps pushing the boundaries on this as they seem to be the only ones doing so effectively. I personally have a hard time keeping my email organized and sorted so any attempts to improve email clients are welcome in my books. Even if the changes aren't necessarily better, trying new approaches and getting feedback on those changes will create an overall better product.
If you want a static and unchanging email experience you might be better served with Outlook. At my job we just switched from Corporate Gmail to Outlook after 6 years and Outlook has hardly changed since I last used it. It's downright ancient!
Because I don't care. I have better things to do with my free time than run a mail server.
email is not secure communications. EVER!
I know you think your email is endlessly fascinating... Get over yourself!
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Yes, exactly like that. The priority mail box used to be something you could disable in the Gmail app, now you can't get rid of it. Also, in the web interface there is the "Important" mailbox which I can't get rid of.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The old Compose interface was fine. I find the new Compose interface crippling, there are several things that I do in Gmail that just don't seem to be there in the new Compose interface, at least I can't find them with a lot of searching. Yes, you can switch back to the old Compose interface, I did that months ago. Lately I've started getting messages that the old Compose interface is going away and I better learn to use the new one. Not that I object to learning something new, although I shouldn't have to if the old one is fine, but the new one doesn't seem to support some very basic functions. Of course, this isn't presenting a problem for the people at Google who help us out and support the product, because there is no one at Google who supports the product and apparently no way to even give them feedback on the problems with the new interfaces.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.