To be honest this doesn't make sense. If the salt and pepper set only had "one function" which is to display advertising in your home (the analogy works pretty well, as I could imagine the set plastered with ads) it still has to work as a salt and pepper set, or people wouldn't use it.

In the example thread above, people are reacting by complaining about the problem. If they reacted by switching email providers, they wouldn’t be in that thread. I highly doubt Gmail’s active user count is affected by any more than a minuscule amount as a result.

to me, your explanation doesn't really explain how an active development team can ignore that issue. If it were just a handful of users talking about an esoteric corner case I could maybe understand.

Those users aren't paying customers.

Besides, it does appear to be a corner case. It has ~200 upvotes. Gmail has 1.5 billion users.

That's 1 in 7,500,000.

If every single one of them quits using Gmail, and they tell all of their friends, and all of their friends quit using Gmail, Google will still be able to tell their paying customers that those ads reach 1.5 billion users.

There are other threads about it. Plus, it happened to me - so the most likely explanation from my end is that it happens in 100% of cases ;).

http://www.google.com/search?q=mail+stuck+in+outbox+gmail

A single quora answer alone has 20k views. Do you think that's a normal number of views on a quora answer? How many views do you think that quora answer should have for you to think it's a problem? 200k? 2m? 20m? 200m? 2b?

(A single quora answer does not represent everyone who has a problem. Maybe 0.01% of people with a specific problem will end up reading a specific quora answer. So I think that 20k represents 200 million users, or more than 10% of Gmail's userbase. While we're just throwing around made up numbers. Maybe it's 100% of installed gmail for android apps with that problem. (Since not every gmail user uses android, uses the android app, and uses it to send mail.)

Anyway I think up to 100% of the android app users could be affected.

Still, you answered the question: perhaps the development team doesn't feel that 20,000 reports is a priority. Maybe the salt and pepper manufacturer doesn't care that every one of their pepper shakers doesn't let peppers out. 20,000 complaints just don't matter.

Important people use iPhone anyway.