Gmail

Gmail will stop scanning your emails for ads personalization

Google's pledged to stop scanning users' emails in Gmail for personalized ads. The important change, coming later this year, will bring personal Gmail accounts in line with Google's business-focused G Suite Gmail service which does not scan emails for ads personalization.

“Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change,” Diane Green, Senior Vice President of Google Cloud, announced Friday in a post on the search giant's official blog.

Ads you see across Google properties and on websites that use Google ads are still going to be personalized based on other factors, including users' settings at myaccount.google.com.

“Users can change those settings at any time and disable ads personalization,” Green said.

Gmail is the world’s preeminent email provider with more than a whopping 1.2 billion users.

“G Suite customers and free consumer Gmail users can remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount as we continue to innovate,” reads Green's post.

Google's ad-driven business model is notoriously reliant upon the company's ability to personalize ads to your interests. The company uses many signals and various tracking techniques to collect anonymized data, which is then fed to its machine learning and artificial intelligence systems to derive useful intelligence for ads personalization.

On the flip side, Gmail scanning has been a common point of contention among privacy-minded users who dislike having their Gmail scanned for advertising purposes. Given that more than three million paying companies currently use the paid G Suite service, Google can certainly afford to stop scanning personal Gmail inboxes for ads personalization.

Apple's iCloud Mail service has never scanned the contents of users' inboxes because the entire iCloud suite of apps and services is 100 percent free of advertising, in line with Apple's commitment to protecting the privacy of its users.

Gmail for iOS now uses machine learning to provide smart replies

Google on Wednesday launched an updated version of the mobile Gmail app for iOS and Android, bringing out a handy new Smart Reply feature based on the company's machine learning technology. Like with canned responses in Apple's own Messages app, Gmail analyzes the contents of your emails to provide up to three canned responses based on what it thinks the sender is asking in their original message.

Smart Replies may include simple “Yes” and “No” responses. If the sender is asking whether to meet on Wednesday or Friday, Gmail may provide a bit more complex replies such as “Let's do Wednesday”, “Friday works for me” or “Either day works for me”.

Once you’ve selected one, you can send it immediately or edit your response starting with the Smart Reply text. By utilizing machine learning, the Smart Reply feature produces better responses the more you use it. “If you're more of a 'thanks!' than a 'thanks.' person, we'll suggest the response that's, well, more you,” says Google.

To learn about the smarts behind Smart Reply, check out the Google Research Blog.

Smart Reply will roll out globally in English first, with Spanish following in the coming weeks. Additional languages for Smart Replies will be added soon, Google has promised.

According to the search monster, the machine learning-assisted Smart Reply feature already drives twelve percent of replies in its Inbox email app.

Aside from Smart Replies in the Gmail app, today's keynote address at Google's annual I/O conference for developers saw the release of the official Google Assistant app for iOS.

Gmail for iOS is available at no charge from App Store.

Choose the default email app on your iPhone with MailClientDefault10

Most iOS users utilize the Mail app on their device by default for any email-related activities because it's the stock app for doing so. Unfortunately, after deleting the Mail app (post-iOS 10), iOS won’t redirect mail:to links to your favorite third-party email app when you tap on them.

MailClientDefault10 is a new jailbreak tweak release by HiDan that fixes this problem by letting you configure a third-party email client as the default app for composing emails, which effectively solves the aforementioned problem.

17 months later, Gmail gains a single 3D Touch shortcut

Google today refreshed its mobile Gmail app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on App Store, adding very limited 3D Touch support nearly a year and a half after Apple first brought pressure sensing to iPhone's display with the September 2015 release of iPhone 6s.

Owners of the iPhone 6s/7 series can now press Gmail's icon to quickly compose a message, but that's about it. Thank you, Google, but seriously?

In my view, Google doesn't really have a clue how to properly build 3D Touch gestures into Gmail in a manner that would save users time and boost their productivity.

The app still lacks Peek and Pop gestures., but we'll get those next year, right?