Everyone loves GMail. Well everyone except maybe the guys at Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail Windows Live Email Experience. Previously I wrote a short post explaining one reason why GMail is that much better than its two competitors; It shows users the things they want to see.
On my own blog recently, I made the satanic suggestion that Mozilla Firefox could be improved. Over a thousand people took time out of their day to explain how wrong I was, either by comments (on my blog, digg, reddit, or other peoples blogs), or by sending me angry emails. The jist of most of the feedback was simply “Firefox is good enough, you don’t need these extras, you can achieve it through plugins”. As I said in my follow up post…
If you stop developing your product once it’s good enough, you’re leaving a big sign above your head saying “Free market Space! Insert better product here”.
It’s easy to pick out atrocious applications and find ways to improve them. It’s a lot harder to fine tune applications that are already high quality. That’s what we’re trying to do here. What little things would make GMail work better for you?
Starting from the top
Google knows damn well I don’t use Photos, Web, Groups, or Documents when I’m logged in under my personal account. However, I use Google Reader almost every time I log in, but it’s hidden away in the middle of a dropdown that includes 14 other obscure services. The other service I use (and love) is Google Analytics, and that one doesn’t even make it to the party! Why can’t the title bar offer me the services I use most often?
Account Settings
A lot of people I know keep two or more GMail accounts, I keep three. One for me, one for my work(iQ), and one for Bigulo stuff. I would kill for the ability to tell Google that I own these three accounts, and for a nice little dropdown to switch from account to account. It’d be nice to remove the excise of the lengthy log out log in process.
Filters for your mail
One thing that Thunderbird, Outlook, Evolution etc. have that GMail is lacking is the ability to create intelligent contextual filters. If I’m reading a mail from news@ixda.org, and I click “Create a Filter”, it should give me a few intelligent options as opposed to ten form inputs laid out like they dropped out of someones pocket.
Calendar
If I send an email to Lar saying “Meeting with $client in Morgan Hotel at 7pm on 8/10/2007″ why can’t the same magic that works in Google Calendar kick in, highlighting the even, asking which calendar I want to add it to?
Update: I’ve heard this one is on the way, in fact Lar says he’s seen it already. It didn’t happen while I was creating this mockup anyway.
Attachments
Have you ever sent an email but forgot to add the attachment? Of course you have!
Wouldn’t it be nice if Google could warn you what you’re about to do? If I use the phrase “Please find attached”, or “I’ve attached” , or “is attached” in the content of my portion of the mail, I’d love it if this happened…
Speaking of attachments, does that long blue bar that reads “View as HTML Open as a Google document Download” annoy anyone else? There is no visual distinction between three very different actions, I’ve clicked the wrong one more than once and brought my browser to a halt as Google Documents tries to interpret a 140 page word document. Something as simple as a gray bar would help here. This really is designed by a programmer …
Please understand the images used here were all created in about 5 minutes using Paint, Gimp, or Visio. They represent the feature I want, not the way I want it to look.
I am married to GMail at this point, I can’t see myself using any other mail client for the foreseeable future. If it sounds like I am criticizing it, I really am not. Behind every great application are users pushing it to be just that little bit better, and that’s all I’m trying to do here.
Your turn
It’s easy to criticize my suggestions as things that “you don’t want/need/write plugins for”, so instead try coming up with your own. Post them here, or blog them and link back here. Or mail them to me, and I’ll add them here.
September 5, 2007 at 5:44 pm
And there is NO WAY to get rid of that “Invite a friend” thing. Because as soon as you spend it all, you get 50 new ones the day after.
September 5, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I’ll second David’s suggestion – it is very annoying to see gTalk chats show up in search results when I very well know what I’m looking for is an email.
I have considered disabling logging of those chats, but never did for emergencies (already happened a couple of times).
September 5, 2007 at 7:12 pm
They really need to spiffy up the Contacts section. Has anyone ever tried exporting contacts out of GMAIL? It’s messy.
The fact that they don’t break out the (physical) address into separate fields should be a crime.
September 5, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Filter for marking a mail “not spam” (whitelisting by sender).
I get email notifications from my blog software, which are mostly undetected spam comments, which I have to mark as spam by hand. GMail automatically puts them to the Spam folder (of course), so I might not ever notice them.
September 6, 2007 at 2:40 am
Ryan (#16) — there *is* an “add to contacts” button but it’s ridiculously well hidden. Look at the “Reply” button at the top right beside “show details”. There’s a drop-down menu beside it (the arrow) with a few useful functions that nobody will ever find!
Beats me why they hid this up there instead of beside the reply button at the bottom of the message. In fact there’s plenty of room to move all of the commands in that drop-down menu (or at least print and “add to contacts”) onto that bottom line instead of hiding them.
Another thing about that line: Could we get rid of “Invite to Gmail” please? I think the exclusivity/cachet has worn off and it’s just irritating now.
September 6, 2007 at 9:12 am
I use the + field a lot. For eg I might say my email address is alpha.centauri+futureshop@gmail.com. I also have several accounts linked to my master account or forwarding to it.
Regardless of who the mail was sent to gmail, when I reply gmail sets the sender to alpha.centauri@gmail.com – which I can optionally manually change to one of a list of known ids.
I would love it if instead gmail were to default to using as the sender the id to which the mail was addressed. eg alpha.centauri+futureshop@gmail.com if that’s who the email was addressed to, or alhpa.centauri@hotmail.com if that’s who it was addressed to and it was in my approved list of accounts.
September 7, 2007 at 1:32 pm
GMAIL needs a ‘read receipt’ option.
September 7, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Be able to split conversations. It assumes that because it has the same subject it is the same.
September 7, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Kevin:
Awesome awesome, thank you!
You know why it’s especially hard to see that dropdown? It is composed of a couple of images that, at least on my relatively speedy computer+Internet, are the absolute last things on the page to load. I just started at a two message conversation for literally like 10 seconds before the arrow and gray background suddenly loaded. A simple text link that said “More” would do the trick (next to the arrow).
Thanks though! At least I know how.
September 8, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I send and receive photos all the time. What I miss is a button like “Open in google documents”, but for pictures: “open in google photos/picasaweb”
September 10, 2007 at 12:28 am
You can link multiple Gmail accounts together so you receive email all at one account, and can send from any other account:
http://internetducttape.com/20.....ward-link/
But the solution I like better is using multiple Firefox profiles for the different contexts I use.
September 10, 2007 at 7:58 pm
I’d like to be able to delete *1* message from a conversation thread.
Also, I’d point most of you to the ‘Help’ section of GMail that shows you how to search by date, size, etc.
September 12, 2007 at 10:06 am
For me – I want a switch to turn off the conversation view. I despise it!
I found a google suggestion page:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/
There is a tick box for the ability to switch off conversations. Plus any other suggestions such as the excellent ones above.
Maybe if enough of us do it they will listen!
September 13, 2007 at 5:44 pm
The points made about improving the gmail experience are good ones, and I hope google considers them seriously. However the biggest consistent annoyance I have with gmail is speed. When first logging in, it’s just too darn slow. That initial 5 to 15 seconds is looong, and there’s nothing to do while you wait, except perhaps switch to another application and do something else. In other words, don’t do what you’ve just decided you want to do.
Yes I understand this is an in-built difficulty because gmail is a _web_ application. Nevertheless it is a consistent everyday experience that makes me always ask “do I really want to do that right now?”, and often the answer is “No, it’s not worth the annoyance. Maybe later when I have more than 1 message to read/write.”
Sometimes I think what I really want is a dedicated portableapps.com style gmail reader.
September 14, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Yep – Multiple gmail account under one roof would be great. I’ve got about 6 in total both personal and business – so it would save me a huge amount of time.
October 17, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Hi Des,
Long time no see, since the Maynooth lectures you gave me – glad to see things are working out for you.
I agree with all the features you suggest, simple yet elegant improvements. Just a quickie with regards to the multiple accounts tool you mentioned – while you wait for this to (hopefully) be developed, did you know you can be signed into 2 accounts simultaneously if you use 2 browsers? I always use Firefox for my “Main account” and have an IE window minimised with my “secondary account” for easy switching between the two.
I haven’t tested this, but I imagine if you also install Opera, you should be able to log into all 3. I imagine you already have all 3 installed due to the nature of your job too!
Cheers,
– Adam.
October 18, 2007 at 1:09 pm
You can have more than one firefox opened at the same time (i use one for personal use, one for my office and one for development – when needed). All you need is separate profiles and start with
start C:\Mozilla\firefox.exe -profile C:\profiles\profile.folder
I use google browser sync for each profile and it works very well. I can move from my desktop to my laptop with almost no fuss (cookies, bookmarks and other stuff is synchronized automatically)
As for gmail… i love it! Id like a software-based solution that would sync to the mail servers and keep a local copy of things for off-line reading.
October 26, 2007 at 8:20 am
good post. i really like the attachment configuration this is greatly helpful for me because i will do this mistake some time when i send email attaching some files. i do have three Email account in yahoo, google and Rediffmail. but i like to use yahoo and google to the most.
February 22, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Hi William Light
is no very good!!!!
September 1, 2008 at 3:28 pm
FORWARD is missing from my email. I can’t forward anything or open mail since you added that tool bar on the side. Need help. Marian Minerd