Do you know that’s trivial to write a marketing email like

“Dear <name placeholder>…”

I get that Google is just a startup with limited resources and can’t afford expensive marketing tools, but this is a basic feature offered in every marketing email software, even free ones.

The reason is that a phishing scammer usually just got a leaked/stolen email list without names, and by stating “dear <name>” they show that it’s not a phishing.

Once you train users that generic emails with “click here to read the message” are legit, then phishers have an easier life.

In this specific case they’re just announcing that a Google service that nobody was using has been killed (as is tradition) and they’re going to delete the data, there’s no reason at all to have a “click here to read”.