Anne Holland

Gmail Watch Week 5: UPDATED

June 17th, 2004

Nothing tells Gmail users they’ve got email in their spam folders. Okay, this isn’t news — we reported in the June 3 MarketingSherpa (link below) — but nobody else seems to be as bothered about it as we are, so we’re going to repeat it here:

If you get an email that (rightly or wrongly) Gmail’s filters determine is spam, it goes to a spam folder. Unlike most other Web email systems, though, the interface doesn’t indicate you have messages in the spam folder or how many, the way Yahoo! (its main competitor so far) does.

Yahoo! recently took away the last incentives that would force a user to at least go into and clear the spam folder when it decided not to count spam email against the user’s total storage capacity and then boosted free users to 100MB. And, it clears out any spam and trash the user hasn’t already dumped, so email that gets routed to the spam folder will likely die unnoticed, and you won’t even get a bounce notice (until the user abandons the mailbox).

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