They can make it possible for me to easily search a trillion pages online from one input box, with a great hit ratio for what I'm actually looking for. But they need to add comical layers of complexity - none of which is new or unique - just to sort my email? It's depressing if that's the best their Gmail team can do.
These 'features' have been done before by other companies and other services, and they didn't solve the sorting problem of email. They're just repeating mistakes other companies made many years ago. There's nothing special about sub folders for an inbox folder, even if you call it a tab.
I would argue that Google needs to think originally again about email, as they did when they first came up with Gmail, and not repeat the poor product choices made by other email products and services.
the same old whining. If you don't like the new features, the blog clearly says you can choose not to use them, they provide backward compatibility.
You say this has been done before, what hasn't. You should live with the features for a while before jumping to immediately trashing them without even having used them.
Nothing is "new or unique" - and nobody wants that either. They want steady improvements without losing familiarity.
I think the fear is that eventually they won't let you turn it off. Google has a habit of doing this type of thing with Gmail (eg the new UI, and the new compose)
Currently, you can't direct searches within nested folders. You either search all messages, or search within one folder/label. So for example, I have e-mails grouped by project, and within big projects there are sub-labels:
If I search in "project1", it doesn't look in any of those sub-folders.
Search also could use a grep-like capability. The "advanced search" options are a bit of a joke, especially coming from a company that cut its teeth on search.
You can search nested labels. If you go into a sub label you should see the search box auto-populate with that label (including the nested on).
For example I have a nested label "Invites" in the label "Calendar" (Calendar/Invites). Searching "label:calendar-invites blah" searches for "blah" inside the nested label.
The issue arises if you know the message you want is somewhere under Calendar, but you're not sure whether it's in Calendar/Invites or Calendar/Rejected or Calendar/DateNotSetYet. As far as I know, it's not possible to search them all at once, just by searching under the tag Calendar.
I agree, you can construct a pretty flexible search system with the existing Gmail implementation. (disclosure: I work at a small startup trying to address email search and archive organization). How many rules do you have set up to achieve your (arguably very reasonable) workflow?
However, to perform a successful search with specific constraints, you must either:
1) Remember a keyword
2) Have a label for the particular constraint you want to use
Our little startup, SolNovus (http://solnovus.com), has been investigating how to make a couple power-user functions like this more accessible. Our priorities are:
1) Fuzzy topic search: make keywords more forgiving
2) Analysis and visualization of email graph: sift through related threads and see the impact of search constraints, represent scale and organization with more than an inbox counter
How about built-in PGP? Even if google stored the private keys by default, it would be a huge step in the direction of getting people to actually use PGP and care about the privacy of their communication.
Sieve support. Why do I need to log into their website (i.e. why do I need to log in a second time, when I already logged in via my mail client) just to set up a server-side filter?
