There's some cool stuff in Gmail Labs. However, I wish google would setup an API (and perhaps an approval process?) for users to develop their own addons with serverside support. I don't think userscripts and Firefox extensions are enough.
just tried it out. works great! now if they only had better filtering of my inbox(more than 90% of my messages a day go unread---creating filters manually is not the answer).
It's actually not hard and was in an internal version of Gmail for years. I guess the problem with it is then people learn to ignore any message not highlighted, so that when you get that one urgent email from a new sender you're prone to miss it.
Another interesting feature would be if you could schedule mails to be sent at a particular time maybe, like the 3mindme post which was posted some days ago.
Amen to that. I've often wanted to send emails out and specify the time they get delivered.
But don't send it at the time we specify - send it out plus or minus two minutes and some change. There's nothing lamer than saying to yourself "Wow, what a nice email about 'thoughts you had today.' It came at midnight - wow, you sure were up late! Oh wait, it came at 12:00:00. What a douchebag."
Well, there is something lamer: if you are the douchebag.
And "archive" to remove the email from the inbox. The filters are pretty good (although I haven't found a way to do AND/OR operators between fields, just within them) and in addition to assigning labels you can auto-archive, among a few other options. Doing the filtering on the server is much cleaner (and more sensible) compared to doing this in Thunderbird previously.
Combining filters and labels with the "Multiple Inboxes" labs feature is even better. I've got labels+filters for each of the customers of my consulting/contractor business and have the ones for whom I'm currently doing projects visible via the multiple inboxes, which gives me the latest info, within its context, all on one screen. Brilliant.
Admittedly, it takes some time getting used to. I hated the Gmail UI when I first started using it and would use Thunderbird instead whenever possible. These days the only negatives I can think of are:
* paranoid policy for attachments. No exes, no zips with exes for sending or receive. This can be REALLY annoying when working on desktop apps for customers. I would upgrade to the paid-for version if that let me switch this off.
* reliability. About once a week either IMAP or the web interface go down. Almost never both simultaneusly, though, and rarely for long, so it's tolerable.
I like the conversations, but what I really want is the ability to turn off conversation views, especially when searching.
Sometimes when I'm searching tech discussions with colleagues/clients, etc, I just want to see the emails with the relevant terms, not all 75 emails in the conversation in a big cumbersome list.
gmail just uses tags instead of folders. That way a single message can be in multiple folders at once. You can still do anything you could do if they were called 'folders' instead.
How so? I email two to four people very frequently. That is much easier than creating a mailing list for every possible combination of PM, Tester, and Doc Writer who works on any feature with me.
Because that only makes sense if you want them replying to everybody else, which is almost never the case, or you'd just make a real mailing list. I'm not saying "don't send e-mails to multiple people" I'm just saying "use CC appropriately."
I, for one, would be safe using e-mail this way: none of my relatives even know where the "Reply" button is (though they long ago located Forward, sadly.) They just create a new message addressed to the original sender when they have something to say.
Average users? One informal writing group I'm a part of sends emails like that, because it makes intuitive sense. You just type in the names and then you send. Making a group takes too long (even though it would save time in the long run, most people see it as unnecessary, and nothing exists to automatically make groups of people as you send), and CC isn't intuitive, especially not to people who are young enough not to be entirely certain what a "carbon copy" is. It's hard to understand what the difference between "multiple recipients" and "multiple carbon copied emails" is if you honestly don't care that much, and most people honestly don't care.
No, that's just asking for multiple people to reply. If that's your idea of a "nightmare", I have some recommendations for you: read Elie Wiesel's "Night", look at Guernica, visit an FGM activism web site, maybe volunteer at a suicide or rape crisis hotline.
As I said above, I merely use CC. This gives the recipients the option of replying to everyone or just to me. Sometimes you'll want everyone to reply to everyone else, but since reply-all is just as easy as reply, I prefer the one that doesn't assume the former.
I don't understand. If I hit reply, then I reply to the person who sent. If I hit reply-all, then I reply to everyone who got the email (barring bcc, of course).
