Issue #240 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #240 of All About Email!

Last week was Part Two of the CNIL/Garante tracking pixel mini-series… the hard part, where we got into what you actually need to do about it.

This week is about Google I/O 2026, which happened last Tuesday, and Gmail just got a significant AI upgrade across the board. If you're an email marketer, you need to know what's coming.

Let’s go! 👇

🧠 Google I/O is Google's annual developer conference, and it's where they typically announce what's coming to all their major products.

This year, Gmail has been more prominent than it has been in a long time.

Here are some of my highlights. 👇

This is the headline feature, and probably the most significant shift to how people interact with their inbox in years.

💡 Gmail Live lets subscribers speak to their inbox instead of typing keywords into a search box. You ask a natural language question out loud:

✅ And Gmail pulls the answer directly from your emails. Gemini powers it, and it can:

🚨 Important: Gmail Live is not replacing standard Gmail search. It's an additional option. Google has clearly learned from the Google Photos AI search debacle, where forcing an AI-only experience caused a massive user backlash, and is keeping the old search bar in place.

Availability: Rolling out this summer on Android and iOS to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US (English only for now).

AI Inbox has been around for a little while (we looked at it in detail in Issue 222). It turns your Gmail into a prioritised dashboard, surfacing tasks, to-dos, and important items on a single page using Gemini.

💡 Until now, it's only been available to Google AI Ultra subscribers (the most expensive tier). That's changing. Google is expanding AI Inbox to Google AI Plus and Pro subscribers, too.

So, a significantly larger number of your subscribers will have this experience.

💡 On top of the above, Gmail is gaining:

🚨 That last one is worth thinking about. Gmail isn't just organising your inbox anymore, it's deciding what counts as done. The email doesn't need to be opened. It just needs to be dealt with.

💡 Daily Brief is a new morning digest feature inside the Gemini app. It sifts through your Gmail, Calendar, and Tasks, prioritises what matters, and presents it in a single, organised snapshot with suggested next steps.

🤔 Think of it as a personal assistant that reads every email you've received overnight and tells you what to pay attention to.

Availability: This one is already rolling out to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the US.

🧠 Gemini Spark is Google's new agentic feature, meaning it doesn't just surface information; it can take actions on your behalf.

It integrates directly with Gmail, Docs, and other Workspace apps and will later this summer expand to third-party tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol).

💡 What does "agentic" mean in practice? Example: Gemini sees an email about a meeting request, drafts a reply, checks your calendar for conflicts, and then asks you to confirm before it sends anything.

🚨 Google is explicit about this; Spark will ask for confirmation before "high-stakes actions," such as sending emails or adding calendar events. It's not firing off replies on your behalf without a green light.

But it’s clear where things are heading, and the foundations for a much more autonomous inbox are already being laid.

Availability: Coming soon to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US.

💡 This one's coming to Gmail a little later, but it's worth discussing now.

Universal Cart is a Gemini-powered shopping cart that works across the Gemini app, YouTube, and eventually Gmail. Add a product to your cart from anywhere across Google, and it will:

🚨 Gmail's role in this will be as a surface where purchase history, order confirmations, and deal alerts feed into the Universal Cart layer.

It's coming to Search and the Gemini app first this summer, with YouTube and Gmail to follow.

💡 This one's easy to miss in the announcements because it's framed as a Search feature rather than a Gmail feature. But it’s important.

Google is expanding Personal Intelligence in AI Mode, giving users the option to connect Gmail (and Google Photos, with Calendar coming soon) so that their personal data feeds into Google Search results.

Not Public Search, but Personal Search. A user might ask Google something, and if they've connected Gmail, the answer can pull from their inbox.

🚨 This is another signal in the same direction: Gmail is becoming less of a standalone email app and more of a private data source for Google's broader AI ecosystem.

Email is becoming context, not just content.

🎉 So Google announced a lot of things. But what does any of this actually mean for us, and wherever you sit in the email marketing community?

If you thought opens were unreliable after Apple MPP, and clicks were getting harder to interpret because of bots, scanners, and security systems, the next layer is that AI may increasingly interpret your email before a human reads it.

I need more time to think and reflect, but here are some things I'm thinking about now. 👇

When a subscriber uses Gmail Live to find information in their inbox, the AI pulls from the content of your emails, subject lines, body copy, and structured details.

💡 The AI is smart; it can infer context and pull granular details. But it can only work with what's actually there.:

🤔 It's a bit like SEO, but for your inbox. Clear, content-rich emails will be easier to find via voice search. Emails need enough substance for the AI to find something worth surfacing.

🚨 This is the one that I think deserves the most attention.

With AI Inbox and Daily Brief now rolling out to a much wider subscriber base, a growing number of your readers are not going to open Gmail and scan their inbox the way we're used to imagining.

They're going to get a digest of what Gemini thinks matters.

💡 Which means: the AI is now an intermediary between your email and your subscriber. It decides whether your email makes the cut into the summary. It determines whether your call to action appears as a to-do.

🤔 We're still early in understanding how this prioritisation actually works, but the signals I'd watch are engagement history, reply behaviour, and whether emails encourage action.

The emails that have historically driven responses and clicks are probably the ones that get surfaced. The ones that don't, probably won't.

Gemini Spark taking actions on behalf of users is an interesting, if not predictable, development.

💡 It means someone could potentially receive your email, Gemini reads it, drafts a reply, and sends it, all without the subscriber consciously deciding anything.

🤔 For transactional email, that could be fine. For relationship-building email? That's a different conversation entirely. A reply that looks like a personal response but is actually generated by AI is not human engagement?

Will it be Friday, or will Jarvis regularly reply on your half, {{first_name|friend}}?

🚨 Universal Cart is the one to watch from a commercial email perspective. Order confirmations, shipping updates, and deal alerts, all of that data flowing into an AI-powered shopping hub, changes the context in which those emails are experienced.

💡 Your promotional email isn't just a message anymore. It could be a data point in someone's AI-powered shopping workflow.

🧠 Before I go, here's something practical. Take your next email, newsletter, campaign, whatever it is, and ask yourself these questions:

💡 If you answered "no" to any of those, tighten it before you send. Not because AI is replacing email. Because AI is increasingly sitting between the email and the reader.

Clarity has never been more important.

🤔 The overarching theme here is that Gmail is no longer just a place where email arrives. It's becoming an AI layer that sits on top of email:

For email marketers, the channel isn't going away, far from it.

But the way subscribers experience it is shifting, and faster than most might acknowledge.

🙋‍♂️ I'd love to know: Does any of this change how you're thinking about your email programme?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}, and let me know.

That's it for this week. 👋

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋