Gmail improvements/ideas
My first post on Google Calendar improvements can be found here. In this post I focus on Gmail:
Spam Sort: Gmail spam detection is great, but I’ve had an occasional mail or two marked as spam; when they were really meant for my reading pleasure! For anyone who gets a few thousand spam messages a week (I do), its a pain to have a glance at all of them and try and make sure nothing non-spammy has gotten in. What I’m suggesting is a section within the spam label, that lists emails to me, that were on the borderline for being marked as spam. A 0-10 ranking would be even better, but I guess a binary label would be better, so as not to give the secret sauce (some advanced Bayesian Filtering) behind Gmail spam filtering.
Viewing big messages: By big I really mean long. For anyone who gets emails with thousands of lines in them (code reviews anyone?) this is a great feature. If your email is too long, Gmail gives you a link at the bottom saying “View entire message”, clicking which opens another window with the entire email contents. The problem with this is that if you want to reply to that email with inline comments, you’ve to open it its entirety, copy the email contents, paste them back in gmail and then type your reply. You of course lose all the nice indentation etc., plus this is a real pain cause the new window that was opened has a the Google logo and other HTML and selecting a few thousand lines without that is a pain! Hence I suggest having a “no clipping” option for long emails (if I’m willing for the nifty gmail AJAX to take a while loading my message… so be it!). Or possibly a simpler solution (from a development perspective) would be to have a reply option in the new window thats opened for viewing the entire message.
Attach notes to emails: I’d like the ability to write notes associated with email threads/specific emails in the thread. This would be in addition to being able to label/star messages. These notes should be part of my Gmail index and automatically appear in my Google notebook (with a special gmail label) with links back to the appropriate email thread/email in my gmail inbox. I’d say notes should be allowed on more Google apps (currently on Calendar only… but these don’t appear in notebook), hence Google notebook becoming an even more central part of my daily routine, a one stop place to see all my notes, not only ones I explicitly typed in there!
Quoted text: Gmail automatically recognizes text that has been quoted from a previous email in an email thread. This is a great feature since it saves me time, in terms of being able to see new text written by someone and not see old contents. But sometimes I’d wish all the quoted text be shown with a single click (instead of me having to click “Show quoted text” 10 times in an email). This definitely is low hanging fruit cause it would take 2 minutes from a JavaScript developer to code!
