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Friday, 12 July 2013

How to fix new Gmail (the one with the tabs)


"Deselect all categories to go back to your old Inbox." - that's what you're doing to fix this.

If you want to play around with other options, your settings page is https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings

Background
Today Gmail decided to rearrange my inbox and move some of my messages into 'social' (things like Quora questions) and 'promotion' (things like Amazon) which is something I've never felt the need to do myself.

It actually sounds like a great way to be able to reorganise messages but I can't imagine librarians being overjoyed if I turned up to their library and rearranged their books even if my system happened to be an improvement (doubtful).

So it immediately got my hackles up. I'm all for improvements but I'd rather not have them imposed. Maybe leave my emails alone and just let me know that a new system is available.

I wonder how many people don't bother to exploit the things that can make their use of email more efficient. You still have to spend time setting things up, or learning how to set things up (or even just absorbing the concept that there are ways to use email more efficiently) and many might think it's not really worth it.

Edit - 16 September 2013
If Gmail on iPad seems to be hiding your social emails then the workaround above might work - @Comprendia has reported back that it does but of course this is an n=1 so your mileage may vary :-)

I've already got oodles of filters and folders imposed on my Gmail email system so everything neatly shuttles itself into the correct spot and there's no need for Gmail to come along and muck it all about thankyouverymuchharrumph.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFri Jul 12, 04:06:00 pm 2013

    Thanks for being on-the-spot with this! Google had this post indexed fairly quickly, too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JoFri Jul 12, 04:27:00 pm 2013

    Thanks - Google probably indexes Blogger posts fairly promptly because it owns the Blogger platform, but I'm glad to hear people are finding out how to undo this Gmail imposition, hopefully a few more posts will crop up too (I've already seen another one).

    To be fair I think this new 'tabbed Gmail' version has merit, it could be really useful, I just wish they'd eased us into it a bit rather than just said "ooh hey guess what, we've moved your stuff around, have fun!"

    ReplyDelete

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