Today Gmail announced they are supporting media queries in Gmail and Google Inbox. This should simplify the creation of emails for multiple platforms. The full list of supported rules can be found on the Google Developer Site.
A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated.
These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail support pages clarify that lack of authentication is not a sign that mail is spam.
This isn’t a huge change for most ESPs and most senders. In fact, Gmail has reported more than 95% of their mail is authenticated with either SPF or DKIM. Now, Gmail does a “best guess” SPF – if it looks like an IP should be authorized to send mail for a domain (like the sending IP is the same as the MX) then it’s considered authenticated.
It’s good to see authentication information being passed to the end user.
One thing we tell clients is that people consider their mailbox a very personal space. They’re offended when people invade that personal space without permission, sometimes to an extent that doesn’t seem proportional to the scale of the offense. And we advise senders who have been invited into the inbox to treat it with respect.
Google don’t seem to realize that.
Today, they replaced one of the two “Send Mail” buttons (and the associated key sequence that people have in their finger memory) with one that silently attached a Minions mic-drop gif to the mail, and then hid any future replies to that mail thread. Quite apart from the fact that people use their gmail accounts for professional communications, this is also sabotaging what many people consider their most personal online space. (And, to make it worse, they had a bug such that sometimes the gif would also be added to mail using the other “Send Mail” button).
There’s No Way This Could Go Horribly Wrong.
People were very, very unamused. Google had already pulled the feature by the time I heard about it this morning.
Never take peoples’ mailboxes for granted. Never.
During the Q&A last week, I mentioned an example of a type of filter trying to demonstrate how complex the filters are. There was some confusion about what I was saying, so I thought I’d write a blog post explaining this.