A neat new Gmail Labs feature can translate email in another language to your native tongue. That’s cool, but when it comes to foreign languages, what Gmail really needs is the ability to search and filter by the language a message is written in.
Let’s face it, if you only speak one language, most of the mail in your non-native tongue is likely spam. Imagine being able to create a filter that deletes, archives, or labels all messages that are -lang:English (not in English), or automatically marks any message that’s lang:Russian as spam. Of course, this gets complicated if a message contains a few languages, but it would be a start to avoiding having to manually process messages that are obviously not meant for you.
3 Comments
cotik
LOL, there IS this operator. you can use it like:
“lang:English”
funny thing is that YOU posted it (!?) here: http://lifehacker.com/323566/search-gmail-by-language
Gina Trapani
Heh, I did! But the operator isn’t documented–b/c it doesn’t work. Since I wrote up that post, a search for lang:Russian turns up zip from my mailbox, unfortunately. Had others try the same and they reported mixed results as well.
But thanks for digging up that post! I knew I’d been hopped up on this idea for awhile!
drylight
This is something I’ve been wanting for a while. Not just the translation of messages, but to be able to detect something that (in my case) is non-English so that I can just delete it and never see it. Not even have it appear in my Spam folder.
I also saw the lang: operators mentioned this week at this post http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/gmail-added-message-translation.html