[grey_earthling]

Would fixing it improve their ad business?

I'm still surprised by how often people (not necessarily you!) forget about misaligned purposes: your purpose for using Gmail is to have a good email service; Google's purpose for running Gmail is to make money, _not_ necessarily by providing a good email service.

When purposes misalign like that, you get users bewildered about why such a competent company would be “incapable” of providing a less crappy service.

Compare with Thunderbird: they make money to pay the bills but no-one's getting rich. Their only way of getting money is by building a good email client — by building features that companies will pay them to build; or by making a general-purpose email client good enough that users will donate.

(I know Thunderbird is not directly equivalent because it's just a client, not an email server, but the email client part is comparable.)

[hiptobecubic]

Ideas from the gmail ads team regularly get shot down by product because it would make gmail suck too much and piss everyone off.

I feel pretty bad for the ads team honestly. Like, their job is to basically just ruin products. Literally no one likes anything they do, ever. Their justification for everything is always just "You have to let us do this because $$$" and no one respects that, even though everyone knows that it's how the world works.

[vineyardmike]

Not just google specifically, but making a product better is good for business. Eg making gmail better means more gmail users who log in more often and see more ads.

Practically speaking, most big (tech) companies probably have split teams for UI/Product and Ads. So there’s most likely a team of product managers and engineers at G who’s entire job is to make Gmail better - regardless of the ad team in the next building over. So those people literally don’t care about making G money per se, as long as they’re not introducing bugs into the ad showing logic or making it worse (see first point).

[singhrac]

So interestingly I think "better spam detection" has a relatively straightforward interface (e.g. connect this app to Gmail's servers via SMTP, move emails between folders), but I assume you need almost Google-scale (or at least more than startup-scale) metadata and spam report collection to be able to do half as well.

One of the rare areas where barrier to innovation isn't market access but actually product quality. That being said I wouldn't pay a lot for this as a standalone service, though I would definitely pay for a standalone email client at this point.