I recently started working with a new company and am rapidly becoming more familiar with GMail and it’s “assumptions” I wrote this feedback message to them:
What has happened over the last several years? Gmail used to actually be an effective tool in my daily work tasks. Now it’s literally better to have a local copy of my inbox and do sync.When I’m in a search that has is:unread and I click an email, don’t update the rowList of emails to now remove the previously unread email. (Mark it as read, create a fake row “clone” of the existing message that is marked as display anyway and that will be the new line item).
Organizing the mailbox has become nearly impossible to do on Any GMail branded interface. The mobile app on Android is absolute garbage for productivity. Stop using “labels” and put back in normal folders. I want the option to have exclusive (this lives here and only here, but also might have a tag relating to this project) Inbox rules shouldn’t be labeled with the skip inbox nonsense, just put Move to folder: <drop down> and be done with. Adding labels is a cool thing, but it’s not the end-all-be-all of organization.
I’m unlikely to see a reply to this but it started some wheels turning. Namely what led to this situation? Was it some “Brilliant” Front-End Engineer who thought tagging would be the way to the future or was this due to a technical decision on the backend architecture (Database redesign, updates, etc)?
Originally written 2020, published 2024