GMail is deteriorating. I loathe the new 'reduced' inline reply UI. Half the time I am searching for how to reveal the sender address or subject field because I need to change them, but GMail seems to think this is an edge use case.
Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.
Yes, it is nearly unusable for me now and it is getting worse. I've thought a lot about it and I believe the problem is related to the requirement of getting new users. Back when Gmail was 'new' it had to be like Eudora or another standalone mail program (or Netscape Communicator if you remember that far back) in order to convert people. It did a good job, but 'new' people, people who have never used a standalone email client think it is 'clunky' and 'ugly.' To get those people it had to be more like IM or facebook A big square to type in, and then trying desperately to pick the right person to send to. Things we oldsters did all the time like maintain multiple email identities was 'cruft', people who called each other 'bro' and 'totalph33r' were the target demographic for the 'new' users. And to some extent all those people who really don't know of what email really is but they use it anyway.
Computer users, which is to say people who use computation devices for arbitrary tasks, and invent new uses on the fly, are not the majority demographic anymore. We are a 'specialty group.'
You'd think they'd put together another team and make a separate frontend. I mean, surely they can build two web interfaces to the same backend storage servers, right? They should have plenty of programmers to throw at the problem.
The fact this hasn't happened probably says a lot about the situation, both technically and politically.
I wonder sometimes if it is the whole 'agile architecture' thing where one person can decide "Oh we're going to change protocol buffers for this service, I'll just push that out ..." and the collateral damage is far and wide. I used to think people who complained about the poor IMAP implementation were just unwilling to go with the flow, and then had the flow take me down to where most flows go after they have come out of the faucet :-).
The next step in the evolution is 'personal' clouds I think. An Internet appliance that you own that you use for mail and media and what not. Back to the future-past but with a more resilient design. Perhaps that idea will bear fruit, it isn't like its getting better in the "internet clouds."
I still think that desktop outlook is the best email. Email is not a stream of random information but things I need to look at and act upon. The amount of magic in gmail makes this use case impossible.
I don't understand the logic behind the new tiny compose window, it looks like something from an IM program. If I'm composing an email surely the most important thing is the thing I am composing, so why give it 1/4 of the screen space?
The second most important thing is the email I am replying to, but the compose window pops up over the top of that obscuring a chunk of it.
Whats even more confusing, is when I double-click on users I used to use to g-chat to, it pulls up the message and I end up e-mailing them instead of messaging them. This is easier to do now that the e-mail window looks like a chat window.
I've noticed others doing this as well. They e-mail me without a subject and its context is from a recent chat.
I think the logic is that you can search through email for things while composing. e.g. I'm composing an email and referring to something in another email I got a few days ago. I can search for that email, read it, and then get back to composing. Perviously I would have had to save the email I was composing as a draft, find my other email, then go back and open the draft.
With the "old" compose UI, you can/could click the box-with-arrow button to transition into a new browser tab or window. Solves the same problem without trying to re-invent windows in HTML. I'm guessing this didn't work (well) on Chrome OS or something?
I've imagined one of their primary internal use scenarios to be Googlers with "giant" monitors who are managing multiple simultaneous email and chat conversations. The new interface turns Gmail into something of a "windowing environment" wherein all that multitasking can be managed within the smaller, quasi-pop-up "windows".
I don't particularly like the UI changes, myself. But then, I'm not... well, to cut it short, I'm increasingly aware that I am not / am no longer Google's target demographic.
I've honestly been appreciating Gmail more and more. I find their interface to be innovative and quickly becoming more and more streamlined and minimalistic. I love the new editing. RARELY do I need complex formatting, so their features solve my 90% needs well and sure I hit a bit of frustration 10% of the time when I need a feature i haven't used before.
With recent innovations I have less and less reason to use dedicated desktop apps. I honestly love every aspect of gmail.
The worst ATM is that desktop clients don't support the multiple inboxes that gmail introduced, so most clients think i have a ton of unread messages. So i wish google would come out with some desktop clients with multiple account support.
Edit: I usually see my email appear in my android app before I even see it in the desktop.
My serious issue with it was forwarding my CV after typing a very personalized message (I send a CV every couple months or so to the rare job post that catches my eye) and when I sent it today, BAM! Forgot to change the hidden subject. I am john's lack of interface.
Social and Promotions should basically just contain the "unimportant crap". If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake.
Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc).
Why have tabs when there's already priority inbox, labels, and filters?
It seems like the new feature is essentially just a way to do automatic (learned?) labeling -- yet it won't let you build your own tabs using already-defined custom labels. :-/
> If something is mis-categorized, you can drag it to the correct section and Gmail should learn from its mistake.
The mistake is making me worry about this shit in the first place.
> Also, as mentioned below, you can revert to the un-tabbed inbox by going to the Inbox section of the settings and disabling all tabs other than Primary, or by selecting one of the split inboxes (Unread first, Priority, etc).
There are things that are interesting - news of upcoming band tours, shipping updates, phone bills - but not of importance when I first check my emails in the morning.
Plus, it has the added benefit that emails which land in anything but the main inbox don't notify your phone, removing a distraction.
May I contact you with a Google question? I've encountered a technical problem which I would like to report, but I am having trouble finding an appropriate communication channel. The technical problem itself is interfering with my ability to use the typical channels.
If you are willing to help point me in the redirect direction, then please contact me via the info in my profile. (I was hoping to contact you privately, but your profile is blank.)
I won't harass you, and I don't expect support from you personally - I'm just hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction, in terms of how to report the tech problem.
Do you mean "Policy is against giving users any meaningful ability to train their filters, but if Neptune is in the Third House, Gmail might learn from its mistake"?
Wow. I just discovered this new misfeature is on my android Gmail app and didn't go away when I killed it on the web version. Where's the option to kill social and promotions on the Gmail app?
1. Click the arrow next to the "To". It'll give you the options for changing who it's sent to, or editing the subject. In the popup composition interface, clicking the word "To" gives you a nice recipient list editor.
Half the time I think GMail is being unresponsive it turns out its just put the cursor on the screen somewhere ready for text and has given me no indication I need to look on the opposite corner of the screen from where I clicked 'reply'
Compose is even worse...
What I especially hate about it is that I expext no clutter around when composing new message, they just screwed up this for me totally. (Ok, I bet they can make it worse)
I realize this is subjective, but I personally love the tabbed inbox.
Having all the "promotional" emails I get sent moved to a separate tab where I only have to look at them when I want to has completely tamed my inbox. My primary tab now only has messages that I care about.
I only wish it was implemented in a way that all clients could utilize it. I personally don't use the Gmail iOS client because I have several work inboxes that I want unified with my personal email.
- "That's what rules and folders are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to weed out spam from their inbox"
Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (SPAM|NOT SPAM). The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of combating spam went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.
Fast forward to present time
- "Hey, now that the problem of spam is solved, email is useful again. So useful in fact that I'm now lost in a sea of emails!"
- "That's what filters and labels are about. It astonishes me how few people like to spend days constructing manual filters to classify email"
Someone adds Bayesian filtering to MUAs/MDAs, classifying mail as (X|NOT X), for interesting values of X. The world rejoices as the intricate filter building interface got reduced to two buttons, and the complexity of classifying email went from O(n) to O(1), and email became manageable again.
In my experience, the second I move something out of my inbox and into a label I never see it again. That entire left sidebar in Gmail is so messy I pretty much entirely forget about anything that gets lost in there.
> Having all the "promotional" emails I get sent moved to a separate tab where I only have to look at them when I want to has completely tamed my inbox.
Personally, I like getting these sorts of emails in my face so that I can click "unsubscribe" instantly and never worry about them flooding my inbox again.
Having to use the new Google Groups, I'm really, really glad I never went the GMail way.
Seriously, the Groups interface is an abomination. "Post" at the top? Really? I had to look for about 30 seconds to find the button when switching from the clear old Google Groups interface to the new mess.
I got that the other day. I was kind of excited, until I started using it. I recently started to play the inbox-zero game, and now I have 3 inboxes to sort through, and make sure things were being categorized correctly. Pretty painful.
Like all the others have pointed out, you can (thankfully!) turn it off.
You see, back when web applications were hopelessly inferior to native applications, we would use a mail client that ran locally on our computer to read email. We could use that same program to check mail across many different email providers... so if we wanted to change email providers, well, we could do that without changing our UI.
These mail clients used standards like pop3 or IMAP to communicate with the mail server. with IMAP, you can check email from multiple devices/computers just as easily as you can with gmail (though, for some reason, most users were confused by IMAP; pop3 was popular long after IMAP was universally available. using pop3 from multiple computers is a huge pain.)
(Of course, this was back before everyone and their dog had their own domain name, so switching email providers was still a huge pain in the ass.)
My suggestion is that everyone pick an IMAP client to handle their email, then switch between providers as-needed.
What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP? What makes you think another provider is not going to stop supporting IMAP, or stop existing at all? What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
Well, you get to choose your mail client independently of your mail provider.
>What evidence is there that google will ever stop supporting IMAP
I have no solid evidence, of course, but the fact that they've disabled xmmp support on gtalk, to me points at a google attempting to become more of an apple or facebook-style 'walled garden'
(and all along, well, google makes money off showing you ads; if you check mail via IMAP, you aren't reading those ads)
>What's so hard about switching providers if google does drop IMAP, particularly if you're using your own domain?
If you are using IMAP to check your mail, and have your own domain, this isn't hard at all.
My view is that being a mass market IMAP provider wouldn't make all that much sense unless google did turn off IMAP, or unless google otherwise started screwing things up (things, I mean, besides the UI)
However... it's easier to do something if you've been doing it for a while, you know? I haven't seriously sysadmin'd a mailserver for anything but my own company in... almost a decade now. It would take me some time to get up to speed. So yes, if I want to be in a position to swoop in if google disables IMAP, I should probably start now.
In the 'configure inbox' panel you can disable tabs you don't care for. If you only keep 'primary', it's pretty much turned off. Now google might force it on you sometime in the future, but I don't really see what would be the point... However I think it would be nice to be able to create custom tabs and associate filters/label to them. I really could see myself putting various mailing list to their own tabs.
I never really liked their new-fangled interface they came up with a few years ago, and they said they wouldn't deprecate the old one, so I kept using it.
That is (Gear icon) -> Mail Options -> General -> "Turn on SSL"... Four mouse clicks through menus is obscure enough, and then you have to do the same on every browser. It should be enabled by default.
It isn't that bad. It really is only 1 click to get there. Mouse over the gear and click mail options in the drop down. You are now on the general settings page that has the SSL option. You don't have to do it for every browser; the setting applies to your account.
YMail TFA is also woefully unavailable to people outside the usual suspects of countries - which is something I don't really get for something as security-centric as an e-mail service.
Although my primary email is Gmail, I recently had the need to get an email for a domain name I own. Since Google stopped offering free custom domain emails, I gave Outlook.com a try.
I was pleasantly surprised. Things seem to make a lot of sense and I like their metro/flat design on the web, easy on the eye.
If you are bored of the new UI changes to Gmail, I'd suggest you check out Outlook.com as an alternative.
There are only a few things I want from a Gmail competitor, whether it be a webapp or desktop app:
- Search. Good, fast search over 7 GB of email.
- Speed.
- Undo send.
- Multiple aliases on the same email account.
It's definitely possible to beat Gmail in the first two, these days, but importing all that email into another service takes a while, so there had better be a good case that I'll get equal or superior functionality. A demo would be nice.
Until then, I'll stick with the old compose, and probably find or write a user script to make the new one work like the old one once it goes away.
(Incidentally, Mail.app comes quite close to meeting the first two, but its search is a bit wonky, and there's no undo send.)
undo send is dumb and the worst name/implementation.
i'd either add a dialog (with default selected button being Cancel) or replace the Send button with a Preview button, which would show the message the same way you read a message, and there you would have the Send button.
Undo send is great. It lets you undo the one time in a hundred that you make a mistake. Your solution would require that everybody click through an additional dialog on every single email sent.
Letting people recover from uncommon mistakes is better than ham-fisted and annoying mechanisms that attempt to prevent the mistake.
"undo" email does nothing else than create a false sense of security.
It probably works for the impatient that is hitting ctrl+enter (or whatever shortcut) too soon by muscle memory. but then it should be called delayed send to not give a false mental model to the user.
the current model is preventing the real mistakes for probably 1/10 of the cases it's needed. and enticing less care and probably bumping the rate in the end.
Neither the dialog nor the preview solves the problem that an undo button solves.
If a dialog or preview comes up for every message you send, you just develop a new habit for sending mail (press the send button, then press the send button again on the dialog / preview). If anything, it just creates more of a hassle for the user.
The undo button is for that 'Oh crap!' moment, when your auto-pilot lead you astray.
I believe currently Yahoo Mail is the only one of the big three (Gmail, Outlook.com) that still puts the client computer's IP address in the message headers for messages sent from the webmail interface.
I've been using Yahoo mail for many, many years. I've always been happy with it. I've tweaked some of it with my own custom CSS here and there and it's great. At some level it feels very much like running Outlook on the desktop, which is what I run for my businesses (I run multiple simultaneous instances of Outlook accessing a separate database per business).
I tried Gmail a few years ago and it simply did not hold a candle to the speed and convenience of Yahoo's offering. They've done a few things I am not thrilled about on the last major update but they seem to be tweaking it behind the scenes.
Beyond that, I've been very much against relying on Google for anything that is critical to my business. Why? They can shut down your entire account and every single Google service you use in a microsecond. When they do you will not know why and you will have no sensible path to addressing or even discovering the problem. That, to me, is the deal breaker. Why cares about the minutiae of their UI, setup, lists, tabs, spam filtering, etc. Your email account can evaporate overnight and you will not be able to do a thing about it. I, frankly, don't cannot comprehend why any business person would even consider using them.
I don't use Yahoo mail because they (used to) insert ads inside the body of your email. Which meant that if I sent an email to a friend, the footer would contain a yahoo ad.
I'm not sure if they changed it, but I don't like the idea of sending an ad along with my email. Put an ad in my user interface all you like, but not in my content.
I remember back when I was proud to have managed to get a gmail-invite.
Gmail was so ahead of everyone else it wasn't even fun. It was even ahead of desktop-clients, which at the time was no small feat. Those were the days of full-page-reload (X)HTML4 pages and the best webmail on the market made people prefer text-mode clients like "pine" instead.
Web surpassing the desktop in user experience during those days were literally unheard of.
Those days are long gone. These days I'm looking for whatever looks like a viable replacement. I really want to get out.
Speaking of e-mail, why does Gmail show a different total number of search results depending on which 'page' you're viewing it from the search results? At least Yahoo gives the exact number.
Yeah, that shit has been driving me crazy for a long time now. I imagine a batty old librarian riffling through a filing cabinet of my emails saying "ooh wait, I found more!"
If it works like Google-Search, results are not an estimate, or not even random, it looks like it is inflated .... for example, if you navigate to https://www.google.com/search?q=zzzfgh , it tells you 5,900 results until you reach a page where there is no more results and it tells you 484 results (for example, I never seen an estimate that was lower then the real count)
Duplicate removal generally happens after the initial count is received. That's why you can get major variations in the count and the actual number of results.
I was stung by the loss of free apps for domains, because I use Appengine and need several distinct email addresses per app. None of them need Drive or anything but email forwarding, so $50 per year per address means a considerable expense. Yahoo's $120 per ten addresses seems far more reasonable.
You can use Google Apps' "groups" feature to get forwarding. You can also set a catch-all address that gets email sent to any valid address at your domain.
On the plus sides it is cheap for good amounts of storage, reliable so far, support is helpful and it is Europe (Hungary) based rather than US based.
The main negative is the lack of documentation and I can't seem to access their forums which may have closed but may have had the answers I needed and avoided an email to support. I also don't know much about the company in terms of ownership and control.
Agreed on the two-factor auth bit: their implementation seems a bit wacky. (At least, their Google Authenticator TOTP implementation. It seemed like their Yubikey implementation was pretty good, but I don't have a Yubikey.)
However, their "alternative login" thing is pretty useful. I have separate (completely random) passwords for the IMAP sync for my phone and work machine, so I can revoke those at any time without touching the master password. In some sense, that setup is similar to the one Google has for two-factor auth and service-specific passwords.
Indeed. And the 'regular' alternative logins do have _somewhat_ limited access, but to be usable for pop/imap/smtp they have to be of type 'full access'.
'full access' regular logins can do _everything_ but modify other alternative logins. If you happen to have domain admin rights added to your login (eg. not the main domain admin account), regular logins can even do that!
I would probably pay double for an "imap/smtp only login" feature. ;)
> "Mr Snowden said that the other partners in the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance of the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand 'sometimes go even further than the [National Security Agency] people themselves.'"
I actually looked for a mail service (besides google) inside the USA, because I figured spying on non-citizen services would be even more prevalent. But it came down to rackspace email (which was "just ok" but lacked any kind of two factor auth/alternative logins) and fastmail (which I found nicer).
FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.
FastMail's highlights for me are:
- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)
- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience
- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.
- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)
- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).
- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.
This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.
I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.
I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.
If anyone's looking for a non-US alternative to Gmail due to PRISM, according to Fastmail's company info page [1] their servers are run by NYI [2], a hosting company based in New York.
It bothers me that neither fastmail or freron have full screenshots of their interface. What reason can they have to not put a tour/screenshots section on the site?
I signed up for their free trial, and when it expired they sent me DAILY all caps messages (with no opt-out, no autologin link, from a noreply address) screaming at me about needing to update my credit card details.
I like their service & want more people to leave gmail, so I signed up to make a suppor request (which I had to verify in true listserv fashion) and wrote a ticket trying to explain how lots of people who signed up would be expecting a web 2.0 style try & buy trial, not a real subscription service that would send them bills! And those people would be turned off by their aggro emails, but didn't seem to get through to the guy on the other end.
So I think fastmail is still pretty oldschool internally (which is a good thing on the security & privacy aspects!) and would be well-served making more modern demos and explanations so they can directly suck people into a non-NSA gmail competitor that has a sweet UI with keyboard shortcuts, good searching etc.
I had no idea that FastMail wasn't free any more until just now when I thought "why can't you just sign up and see it". I've been using it since 2002, although it hasn't been my primary email for a long time. Crazy.
Even though I've used Opera for over ten years, it kinda bums me that they acquired fastmail.fm, because I don't really know where I see Opera three years from now.
For the last week, as a test run I've had a Fastmail account that I've been forwarding my gmail to and have been using Mail.app to check my email. Having been a gmail only user for so long, I totally forgot how handy it is to have emails and drafts in many different windows and how pleasurable a zero latency interface is. Granted, my email habits are a lot different and more high volume than when I last used a proper email client, but still, it's refreshing.
This is a minor nit, but most of the really interesting stuff you can do with Sieve requires the 'variables' extension, which Fastmail doesn't support for some reason. Other than that, it's really nice.
> - An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
I switched to Fastmail a few weeks ago and am as pleased with it as you. Just one question though - I can't find a way to recreate the "All Mail" folder from Gmail, where you would delete mail in Mail.app and it would end up in "All Mail". It ends up in Trash instead. Same with my iPhone - if I delete a message there, it goes to Trash, not "All Mail" like it used to with Gmail. Were you able to get this to work?
I can't see how Sieve is significantly better than Gmail rules. Reading the examples, I seem to have the ability to do everything listed, with the exception of actually rejecting messages (versus quietly deleting/archiving).
For one, it's much easier to maintain complicated rules in Sieve than with Gmail rules. This is just a function of having multiple lines and comments for rules.
I use Sieve to push a summary of certain messages to my phone (with https://pushover.net, another great service). This is not possible with Gmail rules (you can forward an entire message, but not selectively send just the subject and sender). See https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve-notify.html
Note that you don't have to do all that crazy spam stuff -- the build in spam filtering seems to work fine for me. The only manual rule I added was to spam anything with common Russian characters because Russian spam was somehow slipping through the filter.
That’s mostly because the email has already been accepted by the incoming SMTP server by the time it gets to Sieve, hence cannot be ‘rejected’ at the SMTP level anymore.
You can also use IMAP clients. For example I never use the gmail web interface and use Thunderbird instead. I have personal email accounts plus 3 different gmail work accounts so this works far better.
Just trying fastmail my first response is wow this thing is fast.
Using something like this, you quickly realize gmail has become incredibly bloated. And to think gmail in its time was the "fast" solution to a bloated hotmail.
Which email client supports sub-addresses and sending such mail to automatically generated folders?
For the email foo@foo.com, I want to be able to give someone foo+bar@foo.com and when they email me it automatically goes into a generated bar folder without any additional clicks or configuration from me.
However, it has a really nifty feature that makes this idea work much better, in my opinion. You can configure FastMail to use "virtual domains" that will reroute b@a.example.com to a+b@example.com. (To use this, you need a MX record for *.example.com, but that's fine.)
So, for example, I may sign up for a SpammyService with the email spammy@myemail.mydomain.com. Then all emails from SpammyService will be redirected to myemail+spammy@mydomain.com, which will then be filed in the appropriate folder.
This lets me (1) get around services that disallow plus signs in emails and (2) not let an automated system know that I'm auto-filing their emails (and potentially deleting them, etc.)
- Get a 1920x1080 monitor. No, really. Decent ones are cheap and awesome. That said, sure, GMail could support other resolutions better. I have to make my window tiny in order to make Reply remotely unusable - what's your problem with it?
- I have the "Undo Send" Labs features enabled, so I can undo a lot more than your unintentional sends. I can undo my intentional but ill-considered sends, too.
- I can go to Google and search, "When is my next flight" and see (based on my GMail mail confirmation message from the airline) when it is. That's awesome. Better, that integrates with Google Now on my phone. I don't even have to SEARCH, and I see when my flight is, what terminal, what gate, whether it's delayed.
I hate to ask, but what browser are you using to access GMail?
* top posting is useless when you have long e-mail with 6-10 points to address in it.
* being able to see 7 lines at a time is my real problem
* the other real problem is when I have a 100-line email with 10 points to address in it and 10th point ends on line 34, I want to be able to easily cut the remaining 66 lines that come before the signature. I know that people using GMail won't see them anyway, but there are other people not using Google Mail and they will have to look through 66 lines to see if I replied to something else as well.
There is no way to simply select those 66 lines and cut them. If I press shift+end, it selects to the end of the line. If I press shift+PageDown it scrolls the GMail page in the browser down, and I also lose sight of the cursor. Selecting it with mouse is also not straightforward, because of some weird scrolling. The text entry box is simply too small. They shouldn't have tried to fix something that was working perfectly.
I understand Google engineers are not using Firefox and they are not replying to people who use products other than GMail and they have large screens. That is precisely why they lost sight of UX issues their users have. They believe everyone uses Google products only, and maybe they just don't care about those that don't, I really don't know.
- I don't want to have Undo Send. I don't want to wait when I send an e-mail. I don't have time for that.
- So, when you are searching for next flight, you should open GMail. I thought it should be used for e-mail, not search. ;)
- Firefox. Are you implying that I should only use Chrome and GMail is not usable from other browsers?
Your problem is that you have two lines of bookmarks all of the time? Your problem is that you don't auto-hide your taskbar? Your problem is that your version of Firefox shows a menu bar all the time for no reason? =)
Or is your problem that you've never clicked on the drop-down at the top left of your reply, and clicked, "Pop out reply"?
You probably just didn't know about that last one, which is understandable - it's a bit hidden. But I think it solves easily half of your complaint.
As to the editing quoted text, another HN'er responded adequately to that point.
Google engineers do use Firefox, and they do pay attention to people without large screens. Your assertions otherwise are baseless.
You don't wait for "Undo Send." The server politely waits a few seconds for you - you're free to do whatever you want.
I was just curious if you were using some ancient Internet Explorer.
As for my browser, it isn't 2 lines of bookmarks. It's one line of bookmarks and Web Developer Toolbar is the second line. As for the menu bar, and this is the way Linux version of Firefox works, although I would probably turn it on even if it was hidden because I use History, Tools and Bookmarks menus all the time (like 20+ times a day)
I don't want to auto-hide the taskbar, I like to see which applications are running all the time. Not all people use the computer the same way, and I surely wouldn't change my usage pattern of desktop environment just to please one web application.
"Pop out reply" and Shift+Ctrl+End help, and GMail is now usable. So thanks again. :)
BTW, I did try to pop out the message and then reply but, when it pops, it opens a 800x540 window which still has text box with 7 lines of text. Even if I maximize that window, the reply box is still 7 lines and I got half of screen filled with blank white space. I missed that there is a second way to pop it out. One could argue that even HN's default textarea is a better textbox than GMail's.
There's a feature in Gmail labs called "Quote Selected Text" that can be used to cut the remaining 66 lines
You can enable it through the Gmail settings > Labs > "Quote Selected Text", highlight the lines you want to respond to in your email and press the 'r' key to open a reply with only the highlighted part quoted.
It might be possible, but sadly it's rarely been done at any reasonable screen quality. And it seems like an overkill to choose a laptop based on its resolution when you could just have the app not waste space instead.
Yes, and the Pixel and a handful of laptops from Asus and Samsung are the only 1080 px or higher small laptop options around. The mainstream has stagnated around 700-800 px for 12-13" for over a decade now, and when someone puts 900 vertical pixels in a sub-14" laptop it's still out of the ordinary. We did move up since the Portable in 1983, but we haven't advanced much past the X21 in 2001.
I don't think you understand how Undo Send works. You don't have to wait when you send an email, as soon as you click send you are free to do whatever else you want.
I use Opera Mail for GMail, but I installed Y! Mail for Android after reading this because GMail somehow sucks at sending pictures with my phone. Now that I've tried it, Yahoo is much faster. Thanks.
I'm honestly surprised that there isn't yet any open-source software (client and server) that mimics Gmail but works with any IMAP service.
If there is room for many email apps (Sparrow, Apple Mail, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird), there should be a market for many web-based email backends and there should be room for an open-source Gmail analogue that be people can extend and improve.
I run roundcube on my server for webmail access. It's a web-based IMAP client. I'm not sure what you want from a server that isn't already available in the existing open source IMAP servers.
If you have constant Internet connection, then it's fine. Try turning Internet off on your phone for 6 hours and turn it back on. If you have 50 new messages, it might take 5+ minutes for GMail to sync. Yahoo syncs in seconds. FWIW, this is on default Samsung Galaxy S2.
I have to admit, I don't use Gmail for just e-mail. It's more or less my home page -- it's a portal to the people I chat with, the documents I access (on Drive) daily, and just so happens to be where I send e-mails from.
These days, (to me anyway) the fact that Gmail is an e-mail service is a little incidental.
A stark change from when I stopped using Yahoo Mail... signed up a friend, and they already had spam by the time you got into the settings to "opt out" of having your address submitted to third parties.
I really think Yahoo Mail has seriously improved over the past couple of years. I've had an account with them for over 10 years and while gmail originally had more features, I find Yahoo Mail's UI experience superior.
There doesn't seem to be any viable competitors for the combination of GMail + Google Drive. The Drive Apps infrastructure and integration into one account is above and beyond the competition.
Maybe I'm on the fringe, but the yahoo mail experience for me through a browser has been terrible since their last big iteration. It is often unresponsive to the point of being unusable.
But, Ymail for the desktop still suffers... The back button is murder! And I might understand tabs for drafts, but why for each mail I read? I am forever trying to close them.
Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.