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In the "help us grow this site" box on the beta SE sites, there are six icons for ways to advertise the site through social media. Five of them use company icons to connect to that company - facebook, twitter, delicious, stumbleupon and linkedin. But the first icon is a gmail icon, used to represent email in general.

I don't think that's a good generic representative of email - I'd prefer something like the envelope icon we have at the left of our names in the top bar. Certainly, when I clicked it, I expected to get gmail, though my default mailto handler is actually Outlook - instead I got Outlook and was momentarily confused.

I also suspect that Google might get annoyed about it in trademark terms, but really, "one of those things is not like the others" is a bigger concern for me.

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    for me, email and gmail are synonym.
    – Graviton
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 10:25
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    @ngu, which makes the button more confusing.
    – badp
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 10:31
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    @Ngu, it's not about whether e-mail = Gmail for anyone, it's about whether e-mail = Gmail for everyone. And the answer is clearly that it's not.
    – Pops
    Commented Oct 6, 2010 at 12:42
  • @Popular Demand, I think those who're still not using Gmail doesn't deserve to use SO and SEs. Call me extremist, but I believe that it's such a huge loss if one doesn't know how to use the best tools at hand.
    – Graviton
    Commented Oct 6, 2010 at 12:45
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    @Ngu, you have a point; we certainly wouldn't want [email protected] or [email protected] on SO. Freakin' Outlook users, man.
    – Pops
    Commented Oct 6, 2010 at 12:50

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Changing the color of the envelope to something else than red would probably be sufficient to avoid confusion.

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    Just making it an envelope without the gmail-M would work even better.
    – falstro
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 13:05

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