You can now reply to an email just like it’s an instant messaging chat, tacking on a “crying laughing” emoji to an email instead of replying. Google has a whole support article detailing the new feature, which allows you to
express yourself and quickly respond to emails with emojis. Like a messaging app, a row of emoji reaction counts will appear below your email now, and other people on the thread can tap to add to the reaction count. Currently, it’s only on the Android Gmail app, but it’s presumably coming to other Gmail clients.Of course, email is from the 1970s and does not natively support emoji reactions. That makes this a Gmail-proprietary feature, which is a problem for federated emails that are expected to work with a million different clients and providers. If you send an emoji reaction and someone on the email chain is not using an official Gmail client, they will get a new, additional email containing your singular reactive emoji. Google is not messing with the email standard, so people not using Gmail will be the most affected.
If the idea of emoji reactions to email has you selecting the puke emoji, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to just turn this off.
Ron Amadeo
This so-called feature rolled out to my Gmail account on the web just last week, and I have to say it’s a serious contender for most useless update of 2023 – too bad Silicon Valley doesn’t have something like the Golden Raspberry Awards. Not only is it utterly unoriginal, since every messaging app and social network has something similar, it fits very badly into the more longform and serios medium of email. At this point, most personal communication flows through messaging, not email, and the types of discussion taking place over email are not well suited to quick emoji reactions.
For me, mail has become the home of low-value newsletters (I switched the more significant ones to Feedbin), discussions about job offers and interviews (although some of that happens directly on LinkedIn), and travel planning (which, again, is partially shifting to WhatsApp) – none of these require or will be improved by emoji reactions.
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