1y ago

Google is putting ads in gmail. WTF?

Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.

225 comments

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.
- Whoa, there's remotely tech-savvy people who don't turn off 100% of that "new" inbox sorting stuff? Color me surprised.
  That Social/Updates/Promotion shit is absolutely trash shit garbage useless. It does nothing to improve email experience. It exists to serve you ads.
  
  As someone who enjoyed Google Inbox before they killed it, it hurts to read this comment.
  
  That's weird, I feel like it does improve my experience. I like how it categorizes my emails.
  
  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
  
  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.
  
  It doesn't hurt my feelings at all. I find it's still ridiculously easy and painless to get exactly what I want out of my Gmail account. To me the sorting is little more than an irrelevant detail that's easily ignored.
  
  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.
- deleted
  
  Yep. It's always the first thing I do with all new gmail accounts. It's garbage.

Gmail has had ads for at least a decade.
- They’ve only recently started making the ads look like unread emails to try to trick you into clicking them.
  
  Nah they been doing that for years too.
  
  Outlook been doing it awhile, so cheap and shitty.
  
  Ublock origin
  
  Been noticing it at least for the past couple years.
- 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.
  
  A couple of pennies time a Billion users is a lot of pennies.
  It is probably way less than a penny per user per day.

It's been like that for a long time.
- 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

Maybe I’m missing something, but hasn’t this been the case since forever?
I mean, Google is an advertising company. I would be surprised if they didn’t serve ads in their free email service.
- 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.
  
  It's under the promotions tab. Been that way for a while. I just don't use that tab myself so I don't see it often.
  
  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.
- Literally since the beginning AFAIK. Although they allegedly stopped scanning e-mails for targeted ad data years back: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-to-stop-scanning-gmail-messages-to-serve-up-ads
  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.

were these not always in gmail?
- Yes. They have always been a part of Gmail. Even back when Gmail was invite only they implemented ads (one of my accounts is from 2004).
  
  They used to be off to the side, not disguised to look like unread emails.
- I've never seen them and have been using it for close to 20 years now
  
  They only show up if you use the tabs. And then I think they are only in Promotions.
- 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)
- IDK cause I use Adguard DNS and the DDG app. I never see ads anywhere

They have been for years now.

alwayshasbeen.jpg

Wait until you see Yahoo mail.
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.
- Do you go to school in 1998?
- 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.
  
  I don't recall how many ads yahoomail has, but, it's in a spot that when you first open your inbox, it could be mistaken for an actual email.
- Or even Hotmail
- 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…
- That's the problem! If you're ready to adopt protonmail, but no one in your social group is, what to do with an empty inbox?
  
  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.

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.
- Sounds like an amazing system, read the about page. If I wasn't broke and already migrated to free-tier proton services I'd definitely be in.
- Yo!! I think I met you at a convention in San Francisco on Easter weekend this year (or was it last year?)! I’m glad to see this taking off!!
  
  Oh awesome! I’ll send you a DM. :)
- Isn't that labels thing the same as using the + in Gmail? You can use myname+spam@gmail.com to register somewhere, and if you receive anything else on that email address you'll know they shared your email address.
  
  no, it is similar but not the same.
  
  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 “yourname-friends@port87.com” will only get emails from real people.
- Nice work! Quick typo on your website - should be, 'anything you can imagine', not 'anything you can image'.
  
  Oh wow. Thank you.
  
  Fixed!

Don't worry, they're also selling your data on top of that
- Well duh.
  They're selling your data to these companies, so that they can then sell them the ad spot.
  They'll also sell them access to the analytics around the ad campaign.

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
- Turn off your promotions inbox and only have a main inbox and you don't get ads
- LOL, I've had that buried for so long I had to hunt for it to see what OP was talking about. Talk about a non-issue.
- 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.

Y'all they have been doing this for literally years. Don't act surprised it's not fucking new.

If the service is free, you are the product. It's not complicated.
Pay for email, get no ads.
- That statement just makes all of FOSS sound bad, and then people have even less of an idea what alternatives they could be using
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I'm just over here using mutt in my terminal and sipping my tea.
  
  There's no such thing as a FOSS service. The software they use might be FOSS but a service cannot be.
  There are free services that are genuinely free but they have nothing to do with FOSS.
- deleted

Advertising company puts adverts in one of few products they didn't shutter two years in.
Years ago.
More at 11.

Looks like your email account is nothing but adverts anyway, so probably not a huge deal?
- Haha
- look closely where it says promotions toward the upper left. He literally screenshotted the "promotions" tab which is 100% ads. OP is either trolling us or he's clueless because he's never seen that before. But it's always been there.

I'd switch to FairEmail or K-9 Mail instead.
Both are great.
- K-9 is great, nice clutter-free design.
- K-9 was aquired by Mozilla and will soonish re-brand to Thunderbird. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- I couldn't connect to gmail with k9 however it's possible with FairEmail
  
  I tried it, connected with no issues, so ymmv

I remember seeing this at least more than 5 years ago, before discovering the benefits of FOSS.

Protons self-promotions are even more intrusive.
- They're fucking horrible. Full page popups.

Lol who the fuck uses the promotions tab?
You are just using Gmail poorly.
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
- You are just using Gmail.
  You accidentally a word.
  
  ? What? This makes complete sense...
  E. G.: "You are just using Windows" "You are just using Proton Mail" "You are just using xyz"

Bruh your real name is on the image
- Or is it?

It is insiane to me that Google shows these ads to google one subscribers.
I already pay google hundreds of dollars a year, and have done so for years. then over the last 2 yesr they slowly started rolling out intrusive ads into my mobile Gmail app.
It was the final straw for me. I've started slowing migrating my email off Gmail, but my goodness is that ever a slow and painful process.
- Where are you migrating to?
  
  Fastmail & my own domain

Use k-9 mail (its a good email client and it supports gmail)
- They got bought by Mozilla, soon it will be renamed to Thunderbird.
  
  So, is this a good thing or bad thing? Mozilla good, right?
  
  Shit, I'm not even mad at the name change. That's a cool name!

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 they were really doing this it'd probably be considered fraud.
  Clicks need to be real and organic and placing something so a person accidentally clicks it intentionally when they sell the ads would be fraudulent.
  But good luck proving it if so.
  
  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
- That's called a dark pattern, and Google has been gaining a reputation for using them. I totally believe it
  
  Dark pattern, i learned something new today, thank you. Using that term had led me to others who notice it as well.
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31314672

That's what Google is

The real culprit here is BIMI and the Marketing folks.
This is just the beginning, with more mail providers probably joining in sooner or later.
- I don't see the problem with that. Looks like it just shows a corporate logo if they've passed dmarc verification.
  Seems like a nice feature.

Google has always done this. I wouldn't know though because I've turned off a lot of the personalization settings and always use adblocking DNS.

Yep, getting about time to move the rest of my email over to proton...
- I'm doing that now. Have had the free account sitting around for a while now. Decided to upgrade to the $5 version of mail before really starting to use it. They STILL endlessly blast you with that self-promotion. Full-page ads, at that. I'm immediately having regrets about my decision to switch. I'll be primarily using Thunderbird on desktop, and on Mobile if/when they get around to the k-9 to Thunderbird switch, so I don't get their self promo there. But the behavior in general doesn't bode well.

Adguard must block this because I've never seen these in my life

You haven't checked your email in how many years?
- My wife, at one point, had 10k unread. Some people just don't read emails they don't want to read.
  
  Mine's currently sitting in the 30k region.
- Its been about 5 months since I last used gmail. I have mostly switched to Proton now.
  
  Do you like it? I gotta get away from Gmail, too.

They are legally obliged to ~~screw over their users as much as possible~~ maximize shareholder value

Why do people upvote this post, without reading comments that say its nothing new?
- People like to be angry at Google. I mean, fair game, I dislike them a lot myself. But yeah, it's voicing "yeah I hate that too", would be my interpretation.

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.
- 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 it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
- 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)

I suggest Tutanota or Protonmail.
- 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.
  
  closed
  https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge
  I don’t think the release these bridge apps on BSDs or smaller OSs
  As long as your weird OS is supported by Go, you should be able to build and use it.
  I don't see them not releasing binary builds for such niche platforms as a strong argument.
  you’re forced to use their apps on Android & iOS
  I see nothing preventing the use of an alternative client.
  Besides, both clients are FOSS:
  https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-mail-android
  https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail
  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.

Gmail has been doing this for yeeeaars

I'd need to pay for them. I don't care about privacy on my Gmail account so I let it slide.
Edit: oh wait, Proton has a free-tier. Will check
- Proton free tier is pretty decent, used it myself for a good few months.
  
  Is Proton a for profit corporation?

Oh my god, they're really going full enshittification now. Never thought I'd see them stoop this low.

I was helping my dad with some computer stuff and I noticed Microsoft outlook online (Hotmail) has ads as well.
My corporate outlook online doesn't have ads.
And my personal gsuite (paid for Gmail) doesn't have ads.
- It's super easy to block the ad on outlook and get back the lost screen real estate (compared to Gmail). So I always appreciate that.
- Id be pretty pissed if corporate outlook started giving every employee ads.
  I share a Microsoft Office family account with my parents now so at least they aren't getting ads in their Hotmail inbox anymore

Because of low digital literacy

I use protonmail, so I don’t have to see shit like that.

I don't see them with FairEmail client.
- +1 for fair email client, especially with your own email server. The only drawback is that there's no functionality to block specific addresses.

It's restricted to specific inbox tabs. I now only use Inbox, Forums and Updates, and get no adds.

Is that really surprising?
- It’s Google, so no.

🌏👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

I believe this has been going on for a while now. It's one of the reasons why I switched over to Proton Mail.

I'm thinking the mobile users are in the worst spot for this. For desktop all this random spam goes into its own tab that I never look at.
Alas, the spam in my "real" google inbox is all my fault. Shouldn't have gave substack my email address.
- I'm a mobile user and our Gmail is separated into "Primary emails" which is the stuff we really want to see, and "promotions/ spam" which are all the advertisements. that is what OP took a screenshot of. The second one. I don't know why he's just seeing this for the first time and thinks that it's something new. It's been like this since the birth of gmail.

Well, were you approved?
- I only have debit at the moment.

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.

idk what to say so the only thing i'm gonna say is... what the fuck

honestly, just use a mail client. on Android I use k9. on desktop, thunderbird.

Yeah, I knew about that this year, so many ads and comparing with other alternatives it's like... lol

Windows is phasing out the built in mail app which is basic but decent…forcing “upgrade” to Outlook which has ads if you’re not a paid user.
- thunderbird just got a major upgrade with new aesthetics.

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?
- Since it's inception in fact. That's what made it free to use.

Apparently hotmail/Microsoft does the same

That's why I use Gmail through the K-9 Mail app (When I have to).
- But then you have to activate access to Less Secure Apps™. It's so disgusting.

Wait so Google is putting ads in its services now?
WHY UNIVERSE WHY

225 comments