Smarterware

Or just sorting. Period.

for real.

My Amazing Facebook Lack: Ability to execute filters in order, along with a “stop processing” here rule. I want to be able to set up rules to whitelist certain e-mail addresses–e-mail from friends, family, close colleagues–and have all other mail go to a “read later” folder. Can’t do it in Gmail without going through incredible contortions that just aren’t worth it.

I meant Gmail rather than Facebook, above.

I love my gmail, but for work email I still use the ugly, heavy Outlook. And the two reasons: sorting and way more integrated tasks. The latter is forgivable for an email-centric product. The former isn’t. Thanks for voicing this again, maybe someday the powers that be will listen.

I said this on Lifehacker, but I’d love to see a “Mark Future Replies as Read” button. Sometimes you get involved in long and annoying threads, and you’ve gotta mark it as read each time you get another reply.

Or multiple signature support.

I thought that was part of the tactics that gmail was using at us… no sorting is needed. Put it in one big PILE instead of FILING it around. Isn’t it geared so that the search works so well you dont NEED or WANT to be sifting through it? just type what you want?

My #1 peeve with Gmail: Can’t attach or read vCards, plus Google Contacts is almost useless and a few other bonehead deficiencies that make Gmail/Contacts very amateur-hour. Went back to Outlook after four weeks or really really wanting not to go back.

BTW, the Trapani is the best of the bunch on TWig even if she’s been unusually quiet during the last two episodes.

I would have thought it would be fairly obvious to someone like you Gina (a developer).

Sorting all my email (3.5GB of it, around 200K items) is an expensive operation which means either building a sequential index (one for each user, one for each view/sort option) or worst-case, scanning everything, which is seriously expensive.

Marking everything read from here down is easy, and can be done in the background – they only need to actually mark 1 or 2 pages worth for you to think it’s all done – and just do the rest is a background task.

Searching by attachment size should be easy tho. searching IN attachments the same….

I really want a feature similar to this, but for google reader. Specifically, “mark all posts [in a given feed] older than *this one* [selected] as read” or – even better – “mark all posts newer than this one as read”.

The latter would support my workflow best, which is to scan headlines starting from the top of a feed until something looks interesting, and read it. Since I already skipped everything above that headline, I don’t mind marking newer headlines as read.

I know that you have discussed a Firefox plugin for selecting and marking posts as read/unread, but I think doing it with the above command(s) would be great, too.

I don’t know why you would need sort. At work I have to use Outlook and sometimes I go to read the top message and miss and I have to wait for it to resort all of my email, then I have to sort by the date and wait again, then I can try to click the message. So I have 1 reason I hate sort (UI) and 0 reasons that I would use sort for anything other than by time.

Here’s why I want to sort by oldest: I empty my email inbox and archive everything. So, when I’ve got 175 conversations to process, I want to start at the oldest and move forward.

It’s not THAT big a deal, but now I page all the way back to start at the oldest first. I’d like to see the conversations I haven’t attended to the longest on top. (Often I measure how urgently I have to process things by how long it’s been since I dealt with the oldest messages.)

You need to be posting these good ideas on the Google forums for the product.

I haven’t actually had any issues with the lack of sorting as my conversations in my inbox usually fit on one screen perfectly.

Now that you mention it, I always start at the bottom and work my way up.

Sorting should not be that hard, I noticed it’s already in the list of “requested features” though.

Or HTML signatures, .exe attachments, …

I don’t get it, Gmail isn’t sorted by date?