New update does not solve Gmail’s main problem.
Google is on a roll with Gmail. Upgrading the world’s most popular email platform with a raft of AI uplifts that give its 2 billion users some serious decisions to make, as they balance privacy and convenience. And there’s more of the same with its latest update, which helps but still leaves Gmail users in need of different email addresses.
The coverage of Google’s most recent change — the addition of an unsubscribe button and backend process for marketing emails — has been universally positive. And why not. Who doesn’t want a simple way to dispatch spam to the trash folder.
But this is a bandaid when a different solution is needed. It’s not an unsubscribe button you need, it’s a fresh new email address. One that’s not already sitting in countless marketeer and spammer databases pumping out content. And there are plenty of reasons to set up a new account and clean house when it comes to your contact details.
But that only works if the situation doesn’t repeat over time. Even if you just want to prevent the current situation getting worse, you need to stop sharing your email address with anyone that asks. Thankfully, Google has a solution waiting in the wings.
Changing your email address is inconvenient, and so Google has a halfway house. We’re talking Shielded Email, Google’s answer to Apple’s excellent Hide My Email offering that enables users to easily create new email aliases instead of supplying their real addresses when asked to do so online. These new addresses can then be deleted when it becomes apparent they’re driving a mass of unwanted spam in your direction.
This is akin to a new email address any time you want one, addresses that can be turned off at will. None of those you share these with can see your real email address, and that means when you turn one off, you also turn off anyone who has been sold that data.
Android Authority unpicked a Google Play Services APK and reported that Shielded Emails “will be part of Google’s Autofill system. Just think of all the apps or screens where Google pops up with its suggested autofill details based on your saved passwords and usernames; all of these should be the new home for this new Shielded Email.”
Google’s latest Gmail update.
This stops your email address getting into the hands of marketeers and scammers, which is materially better than having to group all this junk together and hit a button to unsubscribe. In reality, you didn’t actually subscribe to most of this in the first place.
As Apple says, Hide My Email “lets you keep your personal email address private, whether you’re creating a new account with an app, signing up for a newsletter online, making a purchase or sending an email to someone you don’t know well.”
Contrast this with Google’s new unsubscribe offering, which sorts junk “by the most frequent senders alongside the number of emails they’ve sent you in the past few weeks,” and then lets you “easily unsubscribe in one click, and Gmail will send an unsubscribe request to the sender on your behalf.”
This is not the same. As Google itself admits, “it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven’t shopped in years can quickly pile up.”
Apple provides new email addresses on demand to “protect your inbox from spam and shield your personal data from hackers.” Unfortunately, an unsubscribe button does neither of those things, it just makes deletions easier.
Google’s equivalent offering can’t come soon enough.
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