The previous discussion had this distinction all over the place as well, but...I've looked at what's in my promotions tab, and a few mailing lists and some of the shop member mail I subscrided went there by default. 'Promotions' is set as a split part of my inbox, not some feature coming out of nowhere with whole new and google only content. Having junk ads in there is the same as having junk ads in my inbox.

PS: yes I can just get rid of the new tabs and go back to the old layout, and tha's what I did. I just hink the difference made between the main tab and promotions tab doesn't seem meaningful in this discussion.

Technically all they did in the tabbed layout was swap the old ads which hovered over the Inbox message list with embedded ads in the Promotion tab.

So the choice is between "Ads in Inbox list + Ads in message view" VS "Ads in Promotions tab + Ads in message view". There's no real difference between tabbed inbox style and the classic inbox styles except presentation if you think about it.

Except that presentation is important. An ad that looks like an email is, in a sense, deceptive, masquerading as something you've valued enough to put in your inbox (well, at least enough not to bother opting out from...).

Reminds me of "Download Now" ads that purport to look like the one legit download link. It turns into a game of "try not to download malware".

I disabled all those ridiculous tabs. Thanks for cluttering gmail google, because god knows simplicity is incongruent with the new Google.