Comments on: Gmail: Love It! Hate It! Love It! Hate It!

By: Gmail: What a Difference a Little White Space Makes | Rendy Blog

Gmail: What a Difference a Little White Space Makes | Rendy Blog — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 02:59:16 +0000

[...] written–probably too often–about my love/hate relationship with Gmail. The hate part mostly relates to the interface, [...]

By: Gmail: What a Difference a Little White Space Makes

Gmail: What a Difference a Little White Space Makes — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:51:37 +0000

[...] written–probably too often–about my love/hate relationship with Gmail. The hate part mostly relates to the interface, [...]

By: csarak

csarak — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:59:10 +0000

The problem with conversation threads becomes worse when you interface with other clients that don’t use the same method (which is everyone I think?). You end up with every email that makes up a part of your thread containing all of the previous thread as well, even though you have all of that in separate frames, because other people’s email clients just append to the existing thread. After multiple people forward or reply to the same message, the result, on either system, is so convoluted so as to be unusable, if you want to look back through the history of the conversation.

By: totalpardo

totalpardo — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:45:06 +0000

Jay –

A stronger privacy policy would be helpful. Your access to private emails for free use of the gui is not unlike a one night stand with the beautiful girl who steals your wallet.

It looks great, but its a big trade off.

Sorry.

By: Jay Harlow

Jay Harlow — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:45:10 +0000

Harry, I’m the user interface designer for Zenbe, thanks for the kind words. Indeed we’ve designed Zenbe to address many of the issues you mention above, such as easier tagging and more obvious access to controls.

The Conversation view issues have also been on my mind a lot recently. As I type, we’re putting the finishing touches on a conversation view feature which is far less cluttered, much more intuitive, and much friendlier than Gmail’s. We also empathize with others who, like you, find conversation view hard to deal with, which is why we allow users to toggle between conversation and single message view.

I hope you’ll continue to check in with us as we roll out new features, at http://blog.zenbe.com/

By: Steph

Steph — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:51:28 +0000

Interesting — one of the things I really really love about GMail is the conversations layout. I like having my e-mails in context. I like it when I wake up in the morning and have ONE conversation thread to catch up with rather than 10 different e-mails scattered between the Twitter and Facebook notifications.

Labels should be tags. I agree they’re cumbersome to add. I’d like to be able to add a bunch of labels by typing rather than point-and-clicking (having suffered from RSI since 2002, I try to stay away from that pointy pointer arrow).

One thing that bugs me that you didn’t mention is that you can’t choose your “default view”. See, I’d like to use the star to flag e-mails I need to act upon. So, my inbox would be unprocessed e-mail, and my starred folder would be my “next actions/to do” e-mails.

Unfortunately, as GMail alwas shows me my inbox when I log in, once an item is starred and archived, it’s out of sight, out of mind. Whereas if I could configure GMail to show me my starred folder when I logged in, instead of the inbox… whee, I’d really get going on those e-mails I still have to deal with.

By: Daniel Hollister

Daniel Hollister — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:45:04 +0000

I don’t use Gmail anymore. I used it as my main address for a full year, and then ditched it. IMAP functionality is still weird (with multiple copies if your email and such), doesn’t support vCard, doesn’t place nice with OS X, remembers EVERYONE I email, not just contacts that I WANT it to remember…

I use Fastmail (fastmail.fm) and while it is not free and the web interface is far from beautiful, it’s great for me for many reasons. I do most of my email from desktop clients, and Fastmail works great on them, including supporting push-IMAP. Their servers are BLAZING fast. I have never had a single second of downtime. Their filtering and antispam features beat Google’s by far. Unlimited aliases. Multiple “personalities.” Good mobile options. SMS service. You can host your own domain(s) if you want. You can give your own custom CSS to make it look how you want.

Gmail and other places certainly beat Fastmail in the GUI arena, but Fastmail’s still works (i.e. never breaks) and since I use desktop clients most of the time, it’s been the perfect solution for me. I do not plan on switching anytime soon.