Official Gmail Blog: March 2016

Official Gmail Blog

News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.

Posted by Victor-bogdan Anchidin, Software Engineer
UPDATE April 1 2pm: We heard feedback that some of you were negatively impacted by this feature, so we quickly turned it off late last night. In addition, we are working to bring back Mic-Dropped messages that had subsequent replies to your inbox, so you can read those.
We realize many of you use Gmail for very important messages, and we are sorry if Mic Drop was in any way harmful to you. Note that if you’re a Google Apps business, education or government user this feature was never turned on.
At Google we have a culture of sharing what we learned when things go wrong, and we want to share these learnings with you:

We should have asked you before turning on the feature, and it should have included a confirmation before sending.

We didn't anticipate accidental clicks: "Send + Mic Drop" was too close to other send buttons ("Send" as well as "Send & Archive"), which caused confusion.

And yes there was a bug. It was rare, but possible to press the regular "Send" button and still Mic Drop if you did the following:

Opened a new compose window

Pressed the “Send & Mic Drop” button with no recipients and saw error message

Edited the message by adding message recipient(s)

Pressed the regular send button.

Again, sorry. We love April Fools jokes at Google, and we regret that this joke missed the mark and disappointed you.
UPDATE April 1 1am: Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page.