Tell HN: Zoho is careless with your inbox

Example 1: Zoho has some kind of “smart” folder system enabled by default but they don’t tell you. I added my email account to my desktop email client and many emails never got through after that. I later discovered they would get filtered into sub-folders such as “marketing”. But since I never configured those folders on my email client I never saw them. Further still, they were sometimes misclassified. For example I was communicating with a contractor on Upwork and I never got email notifications that he had sent me a message because Zoho marked all Upwork emails as marketing. (I finally figured this out after logging into the Zoho web portal and deleted their dumb smart folders).

Example 2: I got an email reminder today about a scheduled Zoom call. Oddly the time was different from the original invite but I figured the meeting time had just changed.

Turns out it was an email reminder from Zoho Calendar (which I don’t recall installing). I didn’t look at the sender - only the subject line and content of the email (because of course a Zoom reminder is being sent from Zoom right?) Nope! The reminder was from Zoho Calender and it used times in GMT instead of PST, which is why I thought the meeting time had changed. So I missed an important meeting.

It seems like their product team is trying to increase usage of their non-mail products and it’s super sketchy.