About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

20 July 2013

Gmail's Inbox Tabs Suck

I love tags in Gmail - they are a brilliant way to organise and manage emails. This past week, Gmail introduced a new feature - inbox tabs - some sort of an automate sort of emails based on sender/content. 

Normally, I don't have issues with most changes in Gmail - but inbox tabs just didn't work for me. During the week, I mostly use the Gmail app on my phone - and I kept getting notification of emails that I couldn't see - because they were automatically moved to a different tab; unless I went and changed my view. And there were quite a few inconsistencies in how emails popped up in different tabs - some LinkedIn emails went under "social" while others went to "promotional". 

Perhaps I use my Gmail differently - I minimise the number of active emails on my Inbox, and archive and tag everything else. What really annoyed me - unlike tags, in the tabs view, I could only ever have an email in one view; so I ended up trying to find emails across multiple tabs. Eventually, I just switched it off.

3 comments:

DX said...

We definitely use Gmail different. I rather love the new layout and think it was a wonderful idea for people like me who does not meticulously label/tag every mail.

Unknown said...

We have filters for those... they just sucked at archiving it properly. Sigh... tabs should be more dynamic by using the labels and we should have suggestions as to which sites get filtered... or moving the labels around on the list would also be nice, then I don't care about the layout. But hey, I'm a monkey- who cares.

alapan said...

Dynamic tabs could definitely be useful - making better use of the tags. As it stands, I find it a waste of time - and like many Gmail innovations - there are polarising opinions.