Ads in the Gmail Tabbed Inbox

One of the features of the new Gmail tabbed inbox is email-like ads placed by Gmail.

Screenshot of the new Gmail ads.
Screenshot of the new Gmail ads.
When you click on an ad, it opens up into a new window, behaving very similarly to an email. People can even forward the email to another person.
What the user sees when the click on an ad
What the user sees when the click on an ad
This new ad type and the placement in the promotions tab has generated a lot of discussion on a number of different things related to email, abuse and spam.

  1. Is this an email? 
  2. Is this covered under CAN SPAM?
  3. If it is covered under CAN SPAM, is Google violating the law by not providing an opt out?
  4. Is Gmail acting abusive?
  5. Should anti-abuse groups take a stand against Google doing this?
  6. Should marketing groups take a stand against Google for doing this?

I’ll talk a little more about these questions in upcoming blog posts. But before I do, I’d love to hear from folks here what you think about these questions. And what do you think of the new tabbed inboxes?

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CAN SPAM ruling against whois privacy protection

A number of bloggers (Venkat B., John L. and Rebecca T.) have mentioned ZooBuh, Inc. v. Better Broadcasting, LLC (No.: 2:11cv00516-DN (D. Utah May 31, 2013)) recently.
In summary of the case is that ZooBuh is an ISP that has sued Better Broadcasting for spamming in violation of CAN SPAM. Their case hinged on the receipt of more than 12,000 emails from Better Broadcasting, LLC. ZooBuh said these emails caused the following harm

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One letter off…

I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good.
I also discovered that at least two other women are using my address. One of them apparently ordered a bunch of wedding stuff from David’s Bridal shop using my email address. I hope Kirstie got her special order in time.
The other case is more interesting. I found dozens of emails in my inbox from what appeared to be friends including me in their email forward chain.
The Comic Sans. The FW:FW:FW:FW:FW subject lines. The horribly drawn cartoons. The inspirational messages. The prayer requests. The invites to bridge night. The followup demands that I reply to their invites for bridge night. The sad emails that I didn’t go to bridge night. There were emails from grandchildren. Questions about where I’d been and if I moved. Prayer chains. The messages go on and on.
Looking back through my inbox, this has been going on since sometime late in 2012. (Told you this was an infrequently used account). I looked and looked and I think I figured out what happened. A woman named Helen appears to to have an email address one letter off from mine (string@ vs stringsstring@) and one of her church friends tried to reply to her and dropped the ‘s’ from the email address. Once she did that, everyone else just kept hitting “reply all” and are including me in their forward chain.
It’s not commercial, it’s not spam. It’s just a bunch of people mistyping an email address and sending mail to someone they don’t know. I’m kinda glad it was a bunch of church ladies rather than Carlos Danger sending … well… Carlos Danger type messages.
People get email addresses wrong sometimes. It happens (ask me about the time I almost got my mailserver blocked because I mistyped an address while sending mail to a blocklist maintainer and hit a trap address by mistake…). The problem is that it can overwhelm an uninvolved person’s mailbox, even when it’s not commercial. Sure, if I was logging in to this account more often I’d probably have shut it down, but if they were paying attention they would have realized Helen is never replying to anything they send.
I kinda feel the same about commercial mailers that send me mail over and over and over again. I never open it, I never reply to it, I never respond to it. I wonder if there is actually anyone actually sending the mail, or if there’s just a lonely mailserver bricked up in a wall somewhere continually sending out spam.
Don’t be the bricked up server in the wall. Pay attention to what your recipients are doing.

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Gmail's new inbox tabs. News at 11.

Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords.
While I do appreciate many of us don’t like change, I can’t quite jump on the histrionic bandwagon. This change isn’t Google declaring war on marketers. Google is, at the end of the day, a marketing company. They live and die by marketing dollars. And before you ask, I don’t really think email marketers can organize a boycott that actually has any real impact on Google’s bottom line and causes them to change their interface.
There are a lot of reasons I don’t think this is the actual end of the world and that marketers should just take a deep breath and chill.
The tabbed interface is really just Priority Inbox v. 2. Priority inbox was rolled out a few years ago and there was quite a bit of noise about how that was going to make email marketing more difficult. While getting email to the inbox at Gmail is a challenge for many marketers, I don’t think Priority Inbox is the underlying reason. I think Gmail has gotten a lot stricter on filters, particularly content filters thus making it harder for borderline mail to get to the inbox instead of the bulk folder.
The tabbed interface is just another way of organizing mail in the inbox. Mail is not moved to any different folders, it’s still in the inbox. Users can enable or disable the settings as they desire and all of the mail stays in their inbox.
New Gmail Tab configuration The interface is not on by default. Users have to actually go in and turn on the setting. For users who don’t set up filters anyway, it’s unlikely they’re going to take advantage of the tabs. I did take a look at the configuration settings. Gmail tries to make it clear what kinds of mails will end up in what tabs by telling you what From: addresses currently in your inbox will end up in a tab if you enable it.
Overall, I don’t think this is really going to cause horrible repercussions to email marketers. In fact, this does seem to offer some benefit to email marketers that use consistent branding. According to Mickey Chandler at Exacttarget, the interface “not only display[s] the number of new emails in the tab, but [also displays the] names of the brands whose mails are in that tab.” This is a good thing for marketers, who now have the chance to get their name in the inbox interface.
One thing I did notice, too, was that when I enabled tabs, Gmail presented me with more advertising in the “promotions” tab and provided no advertising in any other tabs.

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