There are applications and services that I know I like. There are applications and services that I know I don’t like. And then there’s Gmail. Ever since I got my hands on an invite back in 2004, I’ve been a fan…or so I’ve thought. But recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s slowly driving me crazy–and that it may be time for an intervention of some sort.

The stuff that’s great about Gmail is plentiful, and pretty obvious:

–it introduced the notion of monstrous storage capacity for free e-mail, beginning at 1GB and now at 7GB and counting. Even if you use Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or another contender, you have Gmail to thank; without it, free e-mail might still be stuck at 100MB;

–it’s got Google-style searching that’s fast and effective;

–it’s just plain fast;

–it’s got an extremely brass-tacks user interface that doesn’t overwhelm you with ads or promotions for other stuff;

–it doubles as an AIM-compatible IM client (I like Meebo even better, but it’s still nice to have the option within Gmail);

–it offers POP3 and IMAP access for free, letting you mix and match browser-based access with a traditional e-mail client such as Outlook or iCal;

–it’s available in excellent versions for multiple mobile-phone platforms (the Safari-based version for the iPhone is especially well done);

–it’s got extremely effective spam protection.

These features didn’t just turn me into a Gmail fan–they turned me into a veritable evangelist for the darn service. (In 2005, at PC World, I headed the team that named it the year’s second best product, right after Firefox.) When I left PC World and got to pick which e-mail system I used for work for the first time in my life, I didn’t even bother with a desktop e-mail client–I just used Gmail. (I did so via the Google Apps version that allows me to have it host e-mail for my Technologizer.com domain–and hey, that’s another Gmail virtue.)

Here’s the thing, though: In the subject line of the very first e-mail you get in a new Gmail account, Google declares that “Gmail is different.” It’s right. But after years of heavy Gmail use, I still struggle with some of those differences.

The single thing about Gmail that’s most different is its notion of Conversations: Rather than the inbox just listing all incoming mail in the order it arrived, Gmail clusters everything into threads, so that every message in one back-and-forth discussion is grouped together. It’s a wonderful idea, and far more logical than the way the rest of the world does things.

Logical, however, doesn’t always equal good. After thirty years of using e-mail in one form or another, my brain is hard-wired to handle an inbox organized in the standard fashion, so the very fact that Gmail marches to its own drummer complicates matters. And for every aspect of ordinary e-mail that Conversations fix, they seem to introduce at least one new inconvenience. For one thing, they make you deal with every message in a thead even when you don’t want to, which creates an amazing amount of clutter when the discussion includes more than a message or two.

Here’s a snippet of a conversation from my own inbox (personal info redacted):

All I really wanted to look at was that bottom message, but Gmail displays the first few words of the first message in the thread, then a bunch of empty bars to indicate there are other messages in the discussion, then the first few words of the message immediately proceeding the one I wanted to look at. All of which pushes down the item I was looking for, making it harder to find. And none of which gives me anything that I really needed in this instance, since I was interested only in the last message, not the entire conversation.

When you put multiple messages on screen at once, as Gmail does, you also need to provide multiple commands and menus to perform actions on them. Here’s one snippet of a Conversation with five (count ’em) Reply buttons, including two apiece for two of the messages:

I don’t think it’s a sign of senility on my part that I frequently find myself clicking the wrong Reply button when using Gmail, or otherwise pausing to find a command that’s easy to locate in other e-mail applications.

Google could do away with any issues relating to Conversations by making them optional and providing a more standard view as well. That would provide the best of both worlds, and it’s something that you can find folks asking for in the Gmail support group. Four years into Gmail’s life, though, no such feature exists; I have the possibly unfair sense that Google is such a believer in Conversations that it doesn’t want to help Gmail users avoid them.

Here’s another Gmail interface “feature” I still struggle with: I’m considently befuddled by its use of both a More Actions menu and another one that’s unnamed (it’s showing “Reply” in the image below). Just about every time I need to perform an action, I find myself pausing while I try to recall which menu it’s in:

When I pause to think about it, I understand the distinction–More Actions includes commands you might apply to multiple messages at one time, such as applying a Label, while the other one includes commands that only apply to a single message, such as replying. Completely logical; also completely unintuitive…at least for me.

Speaking of Labels: Gmail dispenses with traditional e-mail folders in favor of them. (Most of the rest of the world call them tags.) In theory, they’re better than folders–for one thing, you can apply multiple Labels to one message. But I continue to struggle with ’em for two reasons:

1) The commands for applying a Label to one or more messages lives in that More Actions menu, which sits at the top of your inbox. If you’ve scrolled way down in the inbox to find the message(s) you were looking for, you need to scroll back to apply the label. For me, at least, that’s more cumbersome than simply dragging and dropping messages into a folder, as you’d do in most other e-mail applications.

2) Labeling a message doesn’t remove it from your inbox, making it harder to impose good e-mail habits on yourself by dragging messages you’ve dealt with into other folders until your inbox is nearly empty. I think that this is at least kinda intentional on Google’s part: The idea is that Gmail’s huge storage and great searching eliminates the need to prune your inbox. Once again, it’s a great idea in concept that I find to be a challenge in the real world of everyday e-mail.

Okay, that’s the end of my griping. Very therapeutic!

I have no idea if Google will ever change any of the things about Gmail that frustrate me. I doubt they’ll change all of them; like I say, I have the sneaking suspicion they regard at least some of them as virtues. Hence the intervention I mentioned at the top of this post–which, if it happens, will be self-imposed. I could…

…dump Gmail altogether for something like Yahoo Mail (or maybe Apple’s MobileMe–once all the kinks are worked out, of course);

..try Zenbe, an interesting and elegant service that can, among other things, serve as a front end for Gmail;

…use Gmail’s IMAP access to route my e-mail into a traditional desktop client.

Either of those last two options would preserve my ability to use Gmail in some situations, which would be a plus; like I say, there’s a lot I like about it and I might be happiest if I could use it when I felt like it, but only when I felt like it.)

Your advice would be welcome–be it suggestions for other e-mail applications to use, workarounds for some of the issues I have with Gmail…

 
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