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Comment by tikkabhuna | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked with user config?

In Inbox I had a "Mailing List" bundle that had all my techy subscriptions and when I had free time I could see them. I could easily mark the entire bundle as read.

I'm tempted to start using one of my domains as my email address and point it at a different provider, but I'll see how Gmail fares over the next few months.

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Oh God, the "updates" tab has eaten so many important emails. It won't trigger push notifications, and I don't always remember to check it when I open the page. I still don't understand what the category was supposed to be, but it's main purpose seemed to be to hide important (but automated) emails. I took the plunge and switched to protonmail w/ a custom domain. It's not perfect, and I'm looking at other options, but it's still far better than Gmail. I also moved from gsuite back to MS Office, since I have more faith in the continued stability and it isn't 100% reliant on cloud. Keeping a windows VM around is a definite annoyance, but switching away from Gmail was actually surprisingly easy. The old Gmail address is set to forward all, since I'm still updating accounts as I go, but 3 months in and no real problems. Plus, with email tied to my domain it's far easier to switch providers at this point, if I felt really ambitious I could even run it myself. Definitely worth the time invested.

Thanks for sharing. Good to see other people considering alternatives. I’ll start looking at the options.

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.

Ironically, the Inbox rollups worked absolutely beautifully and the gmail filters are really, really rough and don't work well. "Updates" are so incredibly nebulous that it's really a 50/50 crapshoot on whether or not google knows what should go in there. "Updates" and "Social" are commonly mixed up, and finance/purchases have zero place to go. Are they 'Updates' like when I get a 'Our ToS has been updated' email? Etc. The categories are too general to be useful.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

Ideally, you should move more towards folders rather than these custom tabs anyways: The custom tabs don't work with other email clients, which just see one big inbox.

When I was on Gmail, third party client use led me to replace the tabs with custom rules to sort my social notifications, for instance, into proper standards-compliant actual folders.

That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on the screen, what's the difference?

Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever

Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update...

You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I didn't have to manually update a filter for this one new address. It just worked. Back on gmail, gmail treats that new email as if it has no idea what it is. So into the main box it goes until I manually create rules for this one specific case.

I shouldn't have to manually create a rule for every single email address that ever sends me an email. It's an astronomical amount of work. And now that we know that Google/Inbox was 100% capable of auto-filtering, the idea that we are being transported to the stone age of email is insanity.

Sorry, I was responding to,

> create custom tabs via filters

which as you say, labels are created by filters.

I have no idea how "Inbox rollups" work if they are different than that and than the tabs in gmail, since I haven't used it.

Difference is, Inbox made filters automatically, and in gmail, you're stuck every single day modifying your filters to manually add yet-another-email address, and quite frankly, now that we know Google is perfectly capable of auto-maintaining filters, being forced to do it manually is insanely frustrating.

When combined with the fact that your address is being bought and sold like free candy, and the number of new addresses per week is over 10, it stops being a "you can do this" and starts being a "you must do these chores weekly to maintain any semblance of a useable gmail", I just call it broken. Gmail is broken.

All of those labels can describe social media notifications. The chance you agree with someone else on what they are is under 50%. Promotions should probably just be 'spam' in any email client that works for you. This approach of positivist classification is simply boneheaded.

I venture that customization isn't important for 98% of users, especially less technically minded users. That's why Google consumer products are pretty simple. Moreover, at scale, every customization opportunity needs lots of work to support on every client and backend.

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