It irritates me, because it is at odds with other abbreviations, such as MB and k (for thousand). Surely a single M for million makes more sense? If it were roman numerals, MM stands for 2000.
I bothers the hell out of me every time I see it. It has exploded in use over the last year. That tells me people are using it sort of like a fashion trend, maybe to look intellectual? Same with "that said", "having said that", and "that being said". I enjoy looking at hn posts to see how fast I can spot some variation of "that said".
- Dont' forget Gmail's inability to sort email by anything other than the received date.
- You can't see -and therefore sort or search- by message size either, making cleaning up your account of large messages unnecessarily difficult to achieve.
- Oh, and you can't add labels to a message you are composing so it can be found quickly again later (tedious workaround is to save your message, go to the draft box, open it, apply the labels you want, then send it...)
Ah, yes, I knew that there were some other biggies that I was temporarily forgetting about. Yes, it drives me crazy that I can't tag a message while I'm composing it, and it also drives me crazy that I can't delete the attachment for a message without deleting the whole message. What's up with that???
>> - It doesn't let me search for untagged messages.
>Yes it does (I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by untagged)
Okay, how do I do it then? I've searched the web high and low for many years now, and all I ever find are very tedious work-arounds to what seems to be universally claimed to be a missing features.
Btw, by "untagged" I mean "unlabeled",
>> - It doesn't let me search or auto-tag by contact.
>Yes it does (you can search for a contact, and you can setup a filter to auto tag)
I can search by a contact by wading through menus to get to the contact and then wading through a menu to click on "Show recent conversations", but I've lost my patience by then. Why can't I do it from the search box? The search box is smart enough to show me all the emails that belong to a contact, but there is no option presented there to tell Gmail to search using all the email addresses for that contact.
Also, how do I set up a filter to label messages based a contact. Not based on hardwired email addresses in the filter, but based on a contact, that will automatically pick up changes in the contact?
How do I search through all the messages from all my friends, based on the friends that are in my "Friends" contact group? How to I automatically label such emails in a filter?
>> - It doesn't let me view messages in a fully-threaded, rather than flat-threaded format.
> Why would you want this? Gmail's threading system has been widely copied and I've always thought of it as obviously superior.
I don't find it to be obviously superior at all. In fact, it's quite terrible for use with mailing lists, where a single thread can go on for a thousand messages and branch in a hundred different directions. I can't delete subthreads I'm not interested in. I can't easily refile individual messages in such a thread. Even deleting individual messages is less than perfect.
>> - There's a lot of functionality for which there is no keyboard shortcut. E.g., displaying inline images.
>Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
Big Google wants to protect me from myself. That's so thoughtful!
>> - The built-in GUI editor often doesn't do the right thing. I.e., it routinely just does weird stuff.
> I have no idea what you mean by this, but I'll assume you mean the rich text editor, and I haven't really experienced "weird stuff."
It happens to me all of the time. The same stuff happens in Google Docs too. Google Docs would be the crappiest word processor ever (no section numbering??? no ability to remove words accidentally added to your personal spelling dictionary???), if it didn't live in the cloud. Of course, it living in the cloud makes it better than all the rest, in the same sense that one's crappy cell phone camera is much better than the $5,000 Leica that you never actually have on you.
Yes it does (I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by untagged)
Show only messages without any tag? Seems pretty clear to me.
Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
How is a keyboard shortcut any more worrying than a link? It doesn't have to be a single key, it can be a combination.
Personally, this is what drives me crazy with Gmail. I can almost, but not quite, use it without a mouse. It works for most stuff, and then you get stuck.
I moved to Thunderbird (+muttator) just because of that.
Can you search "-tag1 -tag2 ..." ? I only have 10 tags, so if I really needed to do this, it's fairly acceptable. Not sure if you have a gazillion or something.
Alas, it is buggy, and the view in the pane goes away if you "select" any "conversations", which defeats much of the point of a two-pane mail reader. Sigh. Hopefully it will improve, but I think I'll to wait until they make it better.
Probably lifted by their push of Google+ to sit down and create an account. If you already had a Hotmail or Yahoo account, you may not have had a reason to create a Google account of any kind.
New phone activations, maybe? Android phones work a lot better when they're paired with Google account - you might not use GMail, but you might like the backup and calendar sync features.
30 comments
[ 37.3 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadEdit: It may come from Roman numerals. M = 1000.
MM in Roman numerals would just be 2000. 1 million would be written as M with a bar over it. [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers
-What are your favorite gmail features?
-What do you wish it had?
I access gmail at least 20x/day and I still stumble upon new features. Just learned about "OIB" yesterday.
- It doesn't let me search for untagged messages.
- It doesn't let me search or auto-tag by contact.
- It doesn't let me view messages in a fully-threaded, rather than flat-threaded format.
- It doesn't let me read my mail in a two-pane format, where headers are in on pane and the body of a message is in the other.
- There's a lot of functionality for which there is no keyboard shortcut. E.g., displaying inline images.
- The built-in GUI editor often doesn't do the right thing. I.e., it routinely just does weird stuff.
I guess, overall I'd say that Gmail is the worst web-based email client -- except for all the others.
Yes it does (I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by untagged)
>> - It doesn't let me search or auto-tag by contact.
Yes it does (you can search for a contact, and you can setup a filter to auto tag)
>> - It doesn't let me view messages in a fully-threaded, rather than flat-threaded format.
Why would you want this? Gmail's threading system has been widely copied and I've always thought of it as obviously superior.
>> - It doesn't let me read my mail in a two-pane format, where headers are in on pane and the body of a message is in the other.
Fair (though there is a google labs feature which lets you view message bodies without leaving your inbox by double clicking).
>> - There's a lot of functionality for which there is no keyboard shortcut. E.g., displaying inline images.
Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
>> - The built-in GUI editor often doesn't do the right thing. I.e., it routinely just does weird stuff.
I have no idea what you mean by this, but I'll assume you mean the rich text editor, and I haven't really experienced "weird stuff."
>Yes it does (I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by untagged)
Okay, how do I do it then? I've searched the web high and low for many years now, and all I ever find are very tedious work-arounds to what seems to be universally claimed to be a missing features.
Btw, by "untagged" I mean "unlabeled",
>> - It doesn't let me search or auto-tag by contact.
>Yes it does (you can search for a contact, and you can setup a filter to auto tag)
I can search by a contact by wading through menus to get to the contact and then wading through a menu to click on "Show recent conversations", but I've lost my patience by then. Why can't I do it from the search box? The search box is smart enough to show me all the emails that belong to a contact, but there is no option presented there to tell Gmail to search using all the email addresses for that contact.
Also, how do I set up a filter to label messages based a contact. Not based on hardwired email addresses in the filter, but based on a contact, that will automatically pick up changes in the contact?
How do I search through all the messages from all my friends, based on the friends that are in my "Friends" contact group? How to I automatically label such emails in a filter?
>> - It doesn't let me view messages in a fully-threaded, rather than flat-threaded format.
> Why would you want this? Gmail's threading system has been widely copied and I've always thought of it as obviously superior.
I don't find it to be obviously superior at all. In fact, it's quite terrible for use with mailing lists, where a single thread can go on for a thousand messages and branch in a hundred different directions. I can't delete subthreads I'm not interested in. I can't easily refile individual messages in such a thread. Even deleting individual messages is less than perfect.
>> - There's a lot of functionality for which there is no keyboard shortcut. E.g., displaying inline images.
>Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
Big Google wants to protect me from myself. That's so thoughtful!
>> - The built-in GUI editor often doesn't do the right thing. I.e., it routinely just does weird stuff.
> I have no idea what you mean by this, but I'll assume you mean the rich text editor, and I haven't really experienced "weird stuff."
It happens to me all of the time. The same stuff happens in Google Docs too. Google Docs would be the crappiest word processor ever (no section numbering??? no ability to remove words accidentally added to your personal spelling dictionary???), if it didn't live in the cloud. Of course, it living in the cloud makes it better than all the rest, in the same sense that one's crappy cell phone camera is much better than the $5,000 Leica that you never actually have on you.
Show only messages without any tag? Seems pretty clear to me.
Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
How is a keyboard shortcut any more worrying than a link? It doesn't have to be a single key, it can be a combination.
Personally, this is what drives me crazy with Gmail. I can almost, but not quite, use it without a mouse. It works for most stuff, and then you get stuck.
I moved to Thunderbird (+muttator) just because of that.
Can you search "-tag1 -tag2 ..." ? I only have 10 tags, so if I really needed to do this, it's fairly acceptable. Not sure if you have a gazillion or something.
GMail is a great service.