Thanks Gmail, I didn’t need to know about that recall

Something that I’ve cautioned people against and have had some issue with in my daily gig is that Gmail has started sorting the mail for you. Unless you pay attention you’ve got mail going to some tabs that Google has put there in an attempt to simplify your life.

For me, these tabs are Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates. Guess where the notice of product recalls that could potentially kill a child ended up last week sitting not to be seen? Yup, not my primary box.

Gmail has taken the idea of a spam filter and just run with it. Unfortunately that leaves messages strewn about all over the place that require more effort to find and quite often defy reasoning.

Oh yeah, update – the product you have is going to kill your loved ones… no need to look at this message right now though… no, you look at your fantasy sports league email, we’ll just leave an object’s emergency recall notice sitting there until you get around to it.

Now generally I check all the mail… I don’t have any reason to have the tabs except I have to keep my email looking like other people’s setup so I can help diagnose problems relating to this sort of Google silliness,

Should you be interested in seeing it and turning it off, simply visit your Gmail page, click the cog in the upper right hand corner, and configure which tabs you want to display. Unchecking a tab means the contents will show in the inbox instead of their own tab, so if you’re just worried about updates being tabbed out, uncheck that, they’ll appear elsewhere.

If you decide you can’t live with the updates flooding your inbox, re-enable them and all the ones in your inbox will go back to the updates tab.