The new feature, which works with the web client and mobile app, consists of a new “Inbox Tip” card that asks if you want to unsubscribe from a particular sender’s emails. The card features options to unsubscribe or ignore the tip card.
This new feature doesn’t appear to be available to all users yet, and we’ve seen no reports that it is available on the iOS app, though that doesn’t confirm anything regarding the feature’s place on Apple’s OS. It’s unclear as to when Google plans to roll out the feature to all users, but we imagine it will be coming fairly soon, as it doesn’t appear to be an overly complex addition to Gmail.
Aside from the limited rollout, the other major limitation of this feature is that it only seems to work on emails that Google is able to flag as promotions, so you’ll still need to keep an eye on your inbox.
This is only the latest new feature to be added to Google’s email service. Recently, Google announced that its smart reply feature, which automatically generates email responses, was being used in about 10 percent of all emails sent via the mobile app.
“What this does is it takes an incoming email message and then, given the text of the email message, it tries to predict what are likely responses you might want to give,” Google’s Jeff Dean said. “Now, 10 percent of mobile responses on email on the Inbox product are generated with this Smart Reply feature, so it’s saving people a lot of time.”
Smart replies and inbox monitoring aren’t the only ways that Google is working to save users time. In September, the company rolled out an update which allowed Gmail to automatically convert phone numbers and email addresses into automatic hyperlinks,saving users the trouble of copying and pasting.
