Comment by dwroberts
8 hours ago
When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation.
At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away.
I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
Exactly the same for me. I unsubscribed from more newsletters in the past few days then in the last couple years.
I found the categorization feature distracting anyway because I read all my emails and always had to click through several tabs to see them.
> I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)
I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.
I’ve never had this notification before. I get the direct unsubscribe button if I actually view the email, but not a warning I’m not reading them
It does? I have never once seen this in my life.
There's a pretty long waiting period before it does this. I'm not sure what the time required is, but I think it's at least 3 months. And it only does this if you don't interact with the newsletter at all.
Just speculation, but it's possible if you also use a non-web/non-gmail-app client it might suppress these notifications.
Might be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.
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What’s annoying is some newsletters don’t respect the unsubscribe action and continue pumping the spam.