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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I really liked the idea of the new inbox at first but right now its overzealousness with the Promotions tab is tempting me to merge everything back into Primary. Daily VC news emails are not promotions; digests of roguelike updates are not promotions; emails from my grandmother to try a brownie recipe aren't promotions (well, I guess they sorta are.)

(Yes, you can train it to send emails from X@Y.Z to primary by default, but at that point what advantage is the split inbox offering me?)

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Just drag your daily VC emails into the primary tab and they should got here from now on. Not really any training involved, it only takes a few seconds.

I quite like it, but I'm having to do some work to train it to send some ebay junk into promotion and send some useful ebay stuff from promotion into primary.

I do wonder if Google is using my training data to help other people?

And if they are, should that be scary? Because a lot of people are idiots and I'm not sure I want them to have much influence on my inbox. (See, for example, Google dropping the + operator in search because so few people used it, and even less people used it correctly.)

You can also train it by dragging the email from one tab to another. Sometimes I end up dragging emails from my bank or phone carrier from Promotions to Updates tab.

My primary gripe with the new tabs is that the 'unread message count' is not displayed on each tab and I've to go to each of them every time to see if something new has popped up.

do you have the updates tab turned on? my inbox is pretty good about filing digests and updates under the 'updates' tab and actual marketing under the promotions tab.

it works really great for my usage, where the primary tab is the only one that makes my phone beep. i want to read brownie recipes from grandma and digests of bad updates, but not immediately. Gmail does a great job of sorting out things you need to be notified of into the primary tab, and putting other things in the other tabs.

Overzealous is an understatement. Looks like its categorizing everything from ESPs as promotions. Things like my Newrelic alerts to our servers alerts are being improperly put into promotions. Its an easy fix but there's always possibility i'll miss an important email that gets sent rarely.

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