It seems I did something very stupid recently - I actually turned on a feature in Gmail that was listed under [labs]. The feature in question is called "smart labels" and as a feature it does worse than fail - it has convinced me that I need to move to a different mail provider.

The newly created labels were hidden under the [More] button which makes them invisible (I just now found the way to force the system to always show a label). Once messages are tagged by this add-on they disappear from the inbox. A whole selection of important messages have been tagged as "Bulk". Many of these so called "bulk" messages should be unique to me (I seriously doubt my financial institutions are sending my account summary messages to anyone other than me). So far this "mis-tagging" has cost me at least $200 due to a second chance offer on eBay that was flagged as "Bulk" and thus missed. I am not done adding up the damages yet, time will tell how much this little mess will cost me.

Maybe this is a wake up call for me to shift my accounts away from Google as my primary service provider - "do not be evil" seems to be out of vogue at the minute.