Ars Technica: “Gmail unleashes ‘email emoji reactions’ onto an unsuspecting world”

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.

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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.

Google Workspace vs. Microsoft Office in the workplace

Between all the job changes I went through this past year, I managed to land at a company using Google’s office suite, not Microsoft’s, as it was the default for most of my career. Coincidently, a good friend also recently switched jobs and discovered her new company uses Google Workspace as well. Naturally we exchanged tips and complained privately about the various ways this suite is different, mostly for the worse, than what we were used to.

I wanted to gather these in a blog post, since it feels relevant to other people and to the general themes I write about. I am not touching on the Docs/Sheets/Slides portion of Google Workspace, as we almost never use those – both companies also provide Microsoft Office to their employees, just older versions, not the subscription-based Office365. And I hope no one in their right mind would use the web-based Sheets for complex accounting tasks instead of Excel…

G Suite Updates Blog: “Create and use multiple signatures in Gmail”

It’s now possible to use multiple signatures in Gmail. Multiple signatures give you the flexibility to use different signatures for different situations such as:

• Communicating across teams, organizations, or products
• Communicating across languages
• Using different default signatures for new emails and replies, and more.

G Suite Updates Blog

Even though it was announced on the G Suite blog – and immediately delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic – I noticed this neat new feature on my personal Gmail account a couple of days ago. Until now it remained a relatively advanced feature, to my knowledge only available in desktop mail clients such as Outlook. Nevertheless it can prove useful for personal communication as well; despite the growing popularity of messaging apps, where most of my interactions with distant friends have moved over the years, there are some instances where it’s more convenient to communicate by email. When you apply for jobs, for example, you can now create and reuse a more professional looking signature straight from Gmail. It helps that the formatting options for signatures have been expanded to include colors, bullets and images – last I remember they were very basic.

Bloomberg: “Google will Stop Reading your Emails for Gmail Ads”

Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube. Ads based on scanned email messages drew lawsuits and some of the most strident criticism the company faced in its early years, but offered marketers a much more targeted way to reach consumers.

Mark Bergen

Good decision, although I suspect it has little to do with Google suddenly caring about privacy, and more with the declining relevance of email as means of personal communication. After all, it the majority of messages now flows through encrypted mobile apps, and not through Google’s servers, it makes little sense to process this trickle of emails, because the gathered data will be less and less relevant for targeting.

TechCrunch: “Google reverses Gmail April 1 prank after users mistakenly put GIFs into important emails”

Google has reversed one of its April Fools’ Day pranks after it caused a number Gmail users to unwittingly insert GIFs into business emails and other important communications.

The U.S. internet giant is usually celebrated for its creative April Fools gags — some of its others today are funny — but the Big G’s attempt to inject humor into email via a ‘Mic Drop’ button that inserts a Minions GIF in Gmail messages backfired.

Jon Russell

You would think Google learned its lesson after forcing Google Buzz into people’s mailboxes, but apparently there’s an unlimited supply of social blunders inside the company.

Changing sent email like that without confirmation is an incredible betrayal of trust. The damage from this prank is just getting started.

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) April 1, 2016

My impressions on Inbox (by Gmail)

A couple of days after the launch, I received an invitation for Google’s new email app, Inbox. Despite my initial reaction, I was excited to install and try it out. After a couple of days though, my hands-on impression only served to confirm that Inbox is not for me. I’m an old-time Gmail user, who completely switched from Yahoo! a couple of months after Gmail launched. Since then I created and refined my own system of labels and filters, so that few messages – usually the most important – ever land in my inbox. Other people might find its automated features more appealing, but for me Inbox is constantly interfering with my preferences and established workflow. As mentioned in the invite, Inbox is designed to replace your email experience completely, so for people who already have their own methods of ‘dealing’ with email, it could prove more of a hassle than it’s worth.

If you want to give it a try, maybe even considering replacing your other email apps, you should start by taking a look at the list of features Inbox doesn’t have – and maybe never will. For one there’s no support for other email providers (like in the new Gmail for Android), nor for Google Apps accounts. So business users are out of luck for now – in more ways than one, because Inbox doesn’t let you add signatures or insert your default Gmail signature. There’s also no way to select multiple messages or to manage contacts, and marking mail as spam or deleting is more complicated than in regular Gmail.

Android Power: “Hands on with Inbox, Google’s new way to experience Gmail”

(Your traditional Gmail labels are still present and available, by the way; in fact, if you open up the Inbox settings, they’re listed along with all the Bundles in a tab called “Labels”. But there’s no way to assign a message to multiple labels in this setup; a message is either in the inbox or in a single Bundle/label -- and that’s it. Confused yet?)

JR Raphael

For all the hype and excitement in the press, to me it sounds more like a regression than an improvement. The ability to add multiple labels to a message has been one of the main advantages of Gmail from day one; removing it doesn’t strike me as a step in the right direction. Nor does the fact that on desktop Inbox actively locks out browsers other than Chrome. I get a sense that one of the reasons behind its existence is to nudge people away from email as open standard and towards Google’s proprietary API’s.

Google Inbox is blocked from working in Firefox and other browsers. Not "not optimized," but actually blocked. Chrome-only.

— Seth Rosenblatt (@sethr) October 22, 2014

Quartz: “Google is stealing away Microsoft’s future corporate customers”

Among the Fortune 50, only one company—Google—had its mail records pointed at Google’s servers. Among the mid-size companies, almost 60% host their email with Google, including corporations like Twitter, Dropbox, Box, Airbnb, Square, Uber, and Etsy. And among the Y Combinator startups—mostly very small companies with some funding, but often tight budgets—92% host their email with Google.

This says two things. First, Microsoft and other vendors like IBM still have a tight grip on the largest companies. Gartner analyst Tom Eid—who predicts that enterprise email alone will be a $5 billion global industry this year, growing about 10% from last year—confirms this. He estimates that Microsoft still commands 75% of the market’s spending, versus about 3% to 5% for Google.

But Google is capturing Microsoft’s future customer base. Perhaps this doesn’t hurt as much now, but as today’s smaller companies grow into tomorrow’s leaders, will they eventually switch to Microsoft products? Or will they stick with Google? (Or, also possible—but less dramatic—both?)

Dan Frommer

Here’s a perfect example of misleading chart, of manipulating data to sustain a conclusion chosen beforehand:

• first of all the sample is too small and there’s no mention of how the companies were selected, of the methodology.
• secondly, this is just a snapshot of the current situation, and you cannot draw any valid conclusion about future trends from a single data point. Also, without methodology, even a longer time series would be questionable, since we can’t know if the samples have changed over time, thus influencing the collected data.
• last, comparing Fortune 50 companies with startups is hardly relevant; a single corporation from the left side of the graph is likely employing more people than all 50 startups on the right combined.

persistent.info: “Finding Messages Explicitly Marked as Spam in Gmail”

tl;dr: Search Gmail for “is:spam -label:^os” to find messages that you manually marked as spam (as opposed to ones that Gmail automatically marked for you). Mihai Parparita

Great insight into Gmail’s hidden labels! Many have been uncovered already over the years, like Superstars and Smart Labels, and other have clear equivalents in the user interface. Besides the more fine-grained classification of spam messages, another system label could prove useful, ^p_esnotif, which marks notifications from Google+. You can search for all your Google+ notifications with the command l:^p_esnotif or create a filter to file them automatically under a label, archive them or whatever else you might want to do.

Official Gmail Blog: “Attachments in Gmail, now with the power of Google Drive”

You’re probably used to downloading email attachments, but each of those files takes time to download, eats up space on your device, and can get buried deep inside your “Downloads” folder. With today’s update to Gmail, you can skip that whole process. Instead, you can view attachments and save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you’re on – computer, phone or tablet. Scott Johnston

Hmm, correct me if I’m wrong, but if you save attachments to Google Drive while they are still enclosed in the original email body, you’re effectively making a copy of the file in a new location, using up twice the storage space. Since Gmail and Drive share the same storage, doing this will eat into your quota twice as fast than if you were to simply store files in Gmail! As long as there is no easy way to remove the attached file while keeping the conversation text this just seems like a bad plan!

Official Gmail Blog: “A new inbox that puts you back in control”

Today, Gmail is getting a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control using simple, easy organization.

On the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs. You simply choose which categories you want and voilà! Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when. Itamar Gilad

I find the title ironic, since control is the exact opposite of this new feature: you get a couple of fixed categories and messages get sorted automatically into one of them. Or I should say randomly since in my inbox I saw newsletters scattered across ‘Promotions’, ‘Updates’ and ‘Forums’ with no apparent logic. This sounds very similar to Auto-Enhance on Google+ processing photos in the background, removing control from users and giving it to Google’s beloved algorithms.

Co.Design: “How A Tiny New Compose Window Could Reinvent Gmail”

That said, the new compose offers some other, more immediate UX benefits. For one, it makes multitasking easier, leaving you free to search through your inbox for some scrap of information you might need to mention in the email you’re writing. Kyle VanHemert

On the other hand you could argue that splitting your attention between the compose window and an endless stream of new incoming messages could distract you from actually finishing what you’re currently writing. I personally enjoy the new experience for replies, where I rarely need to edit the recipient list or the subject, but for composing new messages the new style is a step backwards.

Country codes in Google Contacts

Today, while looking up a phone number, I noticed a small change in Google Contacts: phone numbers are now saved with country codes. ‘Contacts’ is not one of my day-to-day destinations and these days I use it mostly as the cloud service behind contacts on my iPhone, so this feature may be already old by Internet standards. But the update could be very significant; I’m guessing Google is preparing some international upgrade to the ‘Call phones from Gmail’ initiative? Otherwise the feature is of limited use for regular users; I can understand the need for it in a business environment, where Google would want its Apps customers to call their partners through Gmail instead of relying on the competition (i.e. Skype and Microsoft).

There is also a new setting to change the default country code in the ‘General’ section. For some reason, probably because I access the Internet at work through a French IP address, Gmail automatically selected France for my account.

Official Google Blog: “Winter cleaning”

Last January, we renewed our resolution to focus on creating beautiful, useful products that improve millions of people’s lives every day. To make the most impact, we need to make some difficult decisions. So as 2012 comes to an end, here are some additional products, features and services we’re closing:

• Google Sync was designed to allow access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. With the recent launch of CardDAV, Google now offers similar access via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, making it possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols. Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won't be able to set up new devices using Google Sync; however, existing Google Sync connections will continue to function. Google Sync will continue to be fully supported for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education. Users of those products are unaffected by this announcement.

Venkat Panchapakesan

I didn’t pay much attention to this announcement until I read a follow-up by Ed Bott. I’m disappointed to see this feature discontinued, since I am using it right now on the iPhone to sync my Gmail account to the default Mail app and receive push notifications and I was kinda hoping to also set up Gmail in Outlook 2013 with this method. In the future if you want push notifications on any other platform than Android you will have to use the official Google app; which could be a problem on Windows Phone, since Google apparently has no plans to develop apps for that mobile OS. Even on iOS replacing EAS with three different protocols for mail, contacts and calendar will bring unnecessary headaches for users, because you need to set up the same Gmail account three times instead of a single time; just try changing your password and re-typing it into three places instead of one.

Also, it’s funny how free users get to enjoy the “open” experience, while the poor paying customers are stuck using EAS/Google Sync. As usual, open it used very freely, as a cover for business decisions. The announcement should actually read: we don’t make enough money out of free accounts to justify the licenses we pay to Microsoft, so you will just have to use the official apps so that Google can collect more data on you and display more ads. And if this is a move to limit the potential threat of Windows Phone 8 on Android by restricting access to key Google services, as some suggested, that’s even worse: it becomes an anti-competitive action. Somehow this is not a Google I would like to trust in the future.

Official Gmail Blog: “Search for emails by size and more in Gmail”

We're always looking for ways to make it faster and easier for you to find your messages using search in Gmail. So starting today, you can now search emails by size, more flexible date options, exact match and more. Christian Kurmann

Forget about searching by email size (you could always do that quicker and more confortable in a desktop client – and much more), the most important update are the new operators has:userlabels and has:nouserlabels. It solves a problem many users had, of discovering unlabeled messages in Gmail. Previously you could only do that by painstakingly constructing a search query that excluded all your manual labels, which was next to impossible if you had more than ten labels or so. Time to update some answers on Quora, I guess…

Official Gmail Blog: “Continuing to bring people front and center in Gmail”

Circles are also now supported in search and filters. Find messages from a specific circle by typing circle:[circle name] in the search box. You can also find mail from any of your circled contacts by searching with has:circle. You can refine your search even further with other criteria and create filters based on circles. This means you can now view all the unread emails from your ‘Friends’ circle or automatically star every message that comes from your ‘VIP’ circle. Itamar Gilad

Finally a meaningful way to use circles in your Gmail inbox! A little bit more automation for managing e-mail can’t hurt, for example a filter like this:

circle:friends subject:-(fw|fwd) ► Apply the label: Friends; Never send it to Spam

or:

-has:circle ► Skip the Inbox (Archive it)

One can’t help wonder why this wasn’t doable with the plain old Groups in Contacts. Going through Google+ seems such an overkill.

I’m curios if this also applies to outgoing mail…

Automatic message translation graduates from Gmail Labs

When I opened my Gmail inbox today I got a little surprise: Gmail prompted me to translate the message from Romanian into English. Not particularly useful in this case, since Romanian is my native language and most of my email communication is in a language I an fluent in, but maybe at some point… The quality of the Romanian to English translation is pretty bad as well.

I searched to see if this was a new feature I missed; turns out this was released back in 2009 in Gmail Labs. It’s not listed in the ‘Labs’ section of Gmail settings anymore and I never enabled it, so I guess automatic translation graduated from Labs and will be available to all Gmail users. Unfortunately, the more advanced options mentioned in the documentation are no longer available: there are no options in the general settings to turn the feature off or to set your ‘Default translation language’, no interface for ‘Translate conversation’. If you turn the automatic translation off, you can re-enable it only from the message context menu: there is a new entry for ‘Translate message’ under ‘Reply’.

Nice, published a full 20 min before the official announcement!

Invite people to Google+ from Gmail Contacts

Continuing the trend of adding Google+ to every possible Google app, we saw an integration between Circles and Gmail contacts back in December – not very well done in my opinion. Probably at the same time, but I haven’t noticed it until earlier today, another option was added to contacts, specifically to add them to circles and invite them to Google+ at the same time. The control is located in the individual contact view on the right side, where you would find the ‘Connected profiles’ section for Google+ members. This new invite feature is probably most useful when adding new contacts, to quickly get them filed in Google Circles as well. For managing your existing contacts this route, visiting them one-by-one, would be too time-consuming; I would much prefer if I could select multiple contacts and add them to Circles in a single move, that way migrating from groups to circles would be more manageable.

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Google Circles in Gmail and Contacts

After design changes and mixing social functions into YouTube and Picasa, it’s now Gmail’s turn to be integrated with Google+ and your circles. As announced on the official blog, I started to see the new features in my inbox. The less important ones, for me at least, include easier sharing to Google+ with a dedicated button displayed when you receive photo attachments and adding people to Google Circles from the newly added people widget. Not much else to say here; the nice part about sharing is that they also added a button to ‘Share all images’, so that when someone emails a group of photos you can immediately create a Google+ post with all of them.

Social filtering added to the inbox looks much more promising, at least at first. A new link has been added to the left pane, ‘Circles’, that can be expanded to display a list of your circles from Google+ with unread counts for each. Clicking on any of them will search all your mail for messages to or from people in that circle; or from any of them, if you click the master link ‘Circles’. The idea is good, since it will filter out any newsletters or one-time conversations with people you haven’t circled, but it’s far from new, as Hotmail implemented filtering by contacts some time ago. It solves a long-standing problem as well, the need to quickly find messages from a group of people; it can be done with regular search, but it becomes very cumbersome as the number of people rises. You can also choose to have membership to circles displayed in the message list, sort of like having automatic labels based on your circles.

Newest and Oldest links in the new Gmail design

After the visual refresh in Gmail launched last month, one thing bothered me that couldn’t be fixed by switching away from the new preview themes: ‘Oldest’ and ‘Newest’ were gone from the navigational buttons. While the interface looks cleaner with only two arrows – back and forward – the functionality is impaired, especially in search results, which still stubbornly show only 20 results per page. I even lamented about the missing buttons on Google+! Fortunately, I discovered them a couple of days back by chance: if you click on the number of messages, you get a small menu with those two options. Not exactly the first place you would look, it you ask me!

And while on the subject of things discovered by accident, the same day I saw that the search autocomplete in Gmail offers suggestions from your quick links as well! I’m not sure when this was added, but It’s a nice addition to the search box. Could it be that Quick Links will graduate from Labs soon?