Topic: Gmail Promotions

The hosts thank their small support staff, including "Eric the Shill" for customer support and Mimi for organizational oversight. They marvel at the diversity of their audience, which spans from intelligence officers to steelworkers, making it impossible to sell to traditional advertisers. Curry emphasizes the importance of the show's newsletter and warns listeners to check their "Promotions" tab in Gmail to ensure they receive it.

Challenges with the No Agenda newsletter delivery on Gmail are attributed to Google's aggressive and potentially corrupt filtering algorithms. While legitimate newsletters are often sent to the "Promotions" or "Spam" tabs, users reportedly receive unsolicited marketing emails from major retailers. The difficulty of whitelisting specific senders in the Gmail ecosystem is highlighted.

The introduction of the "Promotions" tab in Google Gmail has caused a significant decline in open rates for the No Agenda newsletter, dropping from over 50% to 27%. Similar delivery issues are reported with Yahoo Mail, where newsletters are reportedly disappearing or being diverted to spam folders. This shift in email architecture is described as a "mercantile attack" on small businesses, forcing creators to compete with internal ads from the service providers themselves.

Google's implementation of the "Promotions" tab in Gmail is criticized for disrupting email newsletters and marketing, including those sent via MailChimp. The update allows Google to place its own paid promotions at the top of the inbox. A suggestion is made for users to move toward community-based email servers managed locally to regain freedom from centralized corporate slavery.