Good afternoon fellow community.norton.com guests and members:
The purpose of this post is to raise awareness of G-Mail’s restructuring of the inbox with multiple tabs for “social”, “promotions”, etc. Until it was explained to me, I could not understand what was occurring. It looked as though there should be more mail, but it was not showing up. I would have to go under the ‘all mail’ view. Unbeknownst to me, G-Mail was sending advertisements from the different companies I deal with to the promotions tab. To stop this from occurring, please adjust this under your “Settings” for G-Mail. One contributor from G-Mail’s forum apprised me that G-Mail did send out notifications pertaining to this change. That may be the case. Sometimes, I am so focused on critical tasks, that “surrounding noise” (if you will) is filtered out. Some may argue that they appreciate not seeing e-mails from businesses…. Me, I appreciate the coupons and would like to see everything directly in my inbox (centralised) not that I have to hunt down e-mails in other regions of the setup. Yes, you can adjust this, however, my contention is, if they provide for new partitions in the e-mail, that is fine, but allow the user to send certain mail where they want it - - not that G-Mail takes authoritarian power. This situation must be bad insofar as (now) various companies are sending word to their customers to be on the lookout for this.
In addition, we are still having to deal with the frustrating situation of G-Mail attachments failing when you try to upload one in IE 10. Trust me, I have followed multiple lines of logic from their “top contributors” none of the suggestions such as, yet not limited to, running G-Mail without “labs”, disabling Internet Security Programmes (undesirable in my opinion) and running their troubleshooter have yielded efficacious results. It is sad to see countless people on that forum (banging their head against the wall) repeatedly trying the aforementioned to no avail. About the best I have been able to come up with (and what I have been instructing those on that forum to do) is to run G-Mail through an older platform (may be undesirable security wise) - - at least until G-Mail can issue a patch. For example, I am able to load attachments in a scaled-down G-Mail environment utilising IE 7. When I expressed this last point, I was met with some snarky dialogue from one of their contributors that the problem should be resolved by me - - as if I am a G-Mail Engineer. I guess her notion is that since it was able to work in an older environment, the problem rests upon IE. It seems odd, though. I am able to send attachments with my University-based e-mail (granted, that is Outlook) and it doesn’t fail. I mean, how can we 100 percent know that the problem is exclusive to IE? Does it seem like IE 10 is “glitchy” at times, yes. However, can we completely absolve G-Mail? I’m not so sure. Maybe there is an element pertaining to their new “compose” window that is the hitch. Obviously, we would not witness that in the older G-Mail environment through IE 7. From purely a business standpoint, I believe it is in the interest of G-Mail Engineers to look into this further. I would imagine that there are a tremendous amount of IE 10 users who also utilise G-Mail, and, we are not talking about an issue with trivial emoticons (although I do appreciate the cat emoticons here 
) we are talking core functionality with the ability to send attachments. On some level, perhaps G-Mail Engineers are not as concerned in that their product is Chrome. That is a very cut and dry perspective, however, maybe they are not about bringing up the collective good in this regard? I can only introspect.
I have also duly noted a certain sarcasm directed at people on G-Mail’s forum by G-Mail “regular contributors” when they attempt to “lend voice” (if you will) to issues regarding attachment failure, the new compose window, and G-Mail re-organisation. With such attitudes expressed, it makes one wonder if they have something qualitative to offer. Thank goodness our contributors here conduct themselves as consummate professionals.
I must admit, the new compose window starting point (to the right) is undesirable. From what I have heard, you can enlarge it, however, why start it to the right? Why should I have to “crick my neck” (the pain in the neck idea was recently enveloped in a conversation I had with Forum Guru Yaso_Kuuhl) to the right? From an ergonomics standpoint, I always like my eyes to be centered on the computer screen. Funny, between YouTube re-aligning their videos to the left and G-Mail’s compose window to the right, I feel as if there is no “happy medium”. Either that, or I am caught up in a fins to the left, fins to the right, Jimmy Buffett concert, lol. Balance, anouther precept that Yaso astutely pointed out in that conversation. I do my best to have limited dealings with the new compose window by pre-typing in Word and just performing a quick cut and paste. Considering all these things, it almost makes you wonder who is working for Google these days, or, at the very least, if they might consider hiring a new development team. To be honest, ever since G-Mail’s blasé at best interface was instituted and the “dark bar” on Google.com, I feel like it was all downhill from there….
For the quote of the day, I feel it is apropos to take a direct statement from one of the harried G-Mail users, who, I believe, put it aptly when he expressed,
“We give Google access to our private information in exchange for an unreliable e-mail service. I guess we can’t complain too much….”
Regards,
H.B.