Chovy’s Blog

GMail Shortcoming(s)

Sat, December 3, 2005 — Category: Advocacy

why gmail threading sucks

I recently switched from Yahoo mail to Gmail, because of Yahoo’s 15 filter limit, and their weak spam filtering.

One pitfall I cannot seem to get around with gMail is where my new emails are…

Yes. I know they are in the Inbox.

Because of it’s threaded nature, which sounds like a great idea…I cannot find which emails are new.

The threads do not move up to the top of the inbox when a new email is sent to a thread. It remains in the timeline where ever the original email was, thus over time resulting in new emails on page 2.

If I am not using this gMail properly, somebody please set me straight.

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5 Comments »

417

Comment by no one

December 4, 2005 @ 8:24 pm

I’ve been using gmail for months now, and is the fav of the email sites, though I still have hotmail and yahoo accounts, (grandfathered). Vastly perfer the gmail one that is my main account.
When I’ve read an email, I archive it, or respond then archive it once the conversation topic is finished. That way the inbox stays empty or almost empty for new mail.
If you archive a conversation, and it get responded to again, it will show up in your inbox at the top.
You can off course again archive (or delete) it to keep the inbox empty and neat.
Hope this helps.

420

Comment by chovy

December 5, 2005 @ 8:45 am

yeah. if you get very little mail this works. I am on 20+ discussion lists, so 100+ mails everyday are in my inbox.

I would rather have a way to put those in a seperate directory, so they don’t take up my inbox.

And because of it’s threaded nature, it’s very difficult to find the latest emails, especially those that are not associated with a filter/label.

421

Comment by Mike De Haan

December 5, 2005 @ 11:54 am

I just stumbled across this site by accident, but maybe I could be of help. I started using GMail as soon as I could (being by invitation only - ASAP). This was one topic that took some getting used to (no folders in GMail). Instead of folders, GMail likes to take advantage of the Google search features. So to partition your email, you need to apply filters and labels to help organize your inbox. For instance, if you belong to a user forum, tell GMail to Filter for any email coming from the user forum and apply a label such as “My User Forum”. GMail will then place a link accessible from the main screen that will pull up all email that belong to the filter. You can also tell GMail that any incoming email that matches this filter should be moved immediately to the archive (keeps your inbox clean).

Anyways, I’m sure you’ll get the details after playing around a bit.

Here’s a link to GMail help regarding Labels and Folders:

GMail Labels

Hope this helps,

-M

Comment by Dan Warne

February 6, 2006 @ 7:03 pm

I totally agree with this. It’s surprising that Google’s interface on GMail is so bad considering that they’re ‘the web interface’ company. (Then again Google Video has shown that sometimes the uber-simple look isn’t necessarily helpful). I posted an analysis of the problems around Google’s threaded interface on my blog. Some people are now starting to turn their back on Gmail.

Comment by Joan Strom

October 6, 2007 @ 9:16 am

I need “something”, easy to enable me to retrieve my daily email. I cannot find an icon on my desk top to do this. I, most of the time, can not bring up my email without help.

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