I use Gmail as my primary email address and I love it. The space it has, all of the services it offers, and the new ways that it is changing the way we all look at webmail, however after using it for years I have found that there are some really major things that it is lacking that would easily make it the best webmail service possible. I am going to list and describe these features below, and I encourage other members to list features that they really think would make great additions to Gmail. Now I know there is already this topic which is very similar however, I wanted to start out a new topic on a different note: More recent, and one that didn't just copy and paste suggestions from another website. I would also like to provide This link: (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request...) to Google's official suggestion page for Gmail, and I would like to ask members and visitors to this website who are reading this post to suggest the features that they like below. Let Google know exactly what we want from it. Anyway, on with the suggestions:

1. Labels on the individual messages.
When you have over 15 labels on your gmail account it is quite annoying to label something with that "More Actions..." menu, especially if the label is one of the last ones. You have to scroll all the way down, and if you want to label the same message with more than one label, it makes it even more difficult, and the fact that to unlabel a message you must scroll all the way down to the bottom and select "Remove label ..." is even more cumbersome. This is why I suggest a new way of labeling messages. On every message, to the right of the label badges, and left of the subject, place a small button named "Add Label". Clicking on this button would bring down a drop down menu with all of your labels on it, and when you choose a label, the menu doesn't go away, it just checks that label and leaves you free to check or uncheck more labels. Doing this will not only make labeling and unlabeling messages, but it would also clear out that awful More Actions menu to only obscure actions such as mark as read, etc...

2. Grouping of labels
Now I have heard many suggestions like the ability to make sub labels, however that doesn't quite fit in the theme of labeling things. Creating sub labels would make labels a bit more like folders, however if you were able to group certain labels and collapse those groups (for example I have 4 different labels based on different aspects of my job), it would make organization much easier.

3. A Gmail email cliant for your computer
The point of webmail is to be able to access your email on the go. Before Gmail I was always using an email client to access my email, however when switching over to Gmail, I loved the fact that email wasn't being downloaded to my computer, therefore risking different emails on different computers so I started using the webmail. Now I know IMAP syncs with the server so you are not left with this problem when downloading your email on multiple computers, however as far as I know, there are no email cliants that use labels instead of folders, and sync directly with Gmail to be always up to date. It would be great if google created a client for all platforms that basically is an application version of Gmail. It would always access the server and get the information from there but the user interface is all generated by the application, not smoe fancy javascript and css. It would give you the flexibility of an application, with the amazing service and features of gmail. Now what would make this app even cooler is if it could take your contacts, calendars, and documents from Google and sync it with your computer so you could always stay in sync on your primary computer, however you would be able to access all of your files on the go using Google's web interfaces.

4. Skinning Gmail
Now I know changing the way something looks isn't very important however I recently switched my primary browser from safari to firefox just because I saw and fell in love with the Gmail Redesigned 2.0 addon theme for Gmail. Ever since switching, when I log into gmail on a public computer I miss my theme. It would be great if you were able to theme Gmail and attach that theme to your account just like you can with your personalized homepage. Below I have included an image of the theme I am talking about:

 

 

 

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The theme looks really really nice.
That's what I don't like anymore about Gmail, it lost to Yahoo in terms of user interface.

I mean, yes, maybe sometimes Yahoo mail loads a bit slow on bad connections, but it looks really great, and using AciveX for things like drag-and-drop e-mails from folder to folder and so it's really nice.

So I'm with you with the Skins suggestions. The current Gmail looks just too... old-fashioned.

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First of all I also love Gmail and use it intensively... have only occasionally been let down, although on my connection it will sometimes "hangs", i.e. not self updating and been logged out of chat until I refresh the page... I'm not sure whether the problem lies with my connection, browser or gmail server itself, anyway it's only a minor disruption to me..



I think grouping labels in a folder-like way would undermine one of the basics of gmail "search, don't sort", it's either you love it or you hate it but that's the idea underneath, and I'm pretty comfortable with it. Sure sometimes I do feel like it'd be nice to have "sub-labels" but 98% of the cases I can find what I'm looking for by typing a few words in the upper search box, much faster than using folders (as I might have forgotten to put that particular message in the correct folder or something like that )



on the contrary, I've always been a big fan of webmail and never really found it convenient to store my messages on a particular machine, probably due to the fact I used to switch between many computers... so when gmail came it was the natural choice for me and I've never felt the necessity to have a client, although I don't rule out the chance of using it if a good ones comes out, but only if it can keep most of the features of the online version...



yeah that skin does look nice, never thought there were any it could be a good idea, having different skin as this seems the trend in many applications... personally I don't dislike the "basic" interface as it looks clean and professional enough to me, it's all a matter of taste anyway and that's exactly the reason why skins exist!

as for comparison with yahoo webmail (I use that too, less frequently than gmail) I'd say yahoo certainly has a sleek interface, it took them some time too make it stable though and I still experience little crashes from time to time.. yeah the ActiveX controls allow for a more desktop-like experience (drag&drop, etc.) but it's not something I really miss on gmail and is prone to troubles on a slower computer, an old browser, a screen resolution lower than 1024x768, etc.

last (but not least!) what would keep me with gmail alone is the fact that no ad-banners clog up your screen and bandwidth! no half-naked girls popping up nor lengthy "Loading..." on the browser tab

and if the system is jammed or the connection very slow... basic HTML version is just a click away!

 

 

 

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Themes are a very good idea... But the problem is these things make Gmail heavy , so such options should be kept as optional. Otherwise.. if things are pushed, it will not go to success. I am sure, you will understand that the whole power of Gmail is in its simple and powerful interface and it do not load pictures that easily... It has options to load them. So, the power of Gmail lies in its text only interface... So if the themes ans other stuffs come in... it might become heavy weight. But I think there are lots of addons available in Firefox that provide such features.. So people who want them... can very well take and use those addons very easily...

Regarding the grouping of labels.. its a very nice option. BUt I also feel that it can be achieved with the existing labels feature... You can always do a search on more than one label... So you can have a high level label and more than one lower level of labels... So... depending on your needs they can be marked with more than one labesl... So... searching also will become efficient and will also help you in organizing stuffs.

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Yes gmail is great, and the ajax loading is faster than yahoo's. Yahoo's ajax is rather slower and quite messy
The only problems with gmail is, sometimes we input the correct password and it cant login and even ask for image verification (captcha) and thats annoying since we do not mistakenly type our password

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You didn't read what I said there at all. I said the idea of sub-labels was a bad idea. However, I wanted to be able to group labels. You wouldn't be able to put any messages in the group, however, the group can collapse to hide those specific labels. I have a ton of labels that represent other emails that are automatically forwarded to my gmail, so many that I don't want to see them in my labels box anymore, I just want to be able to collapse them all under one general group so I can only see the important labels.



Once again, another example of you not reading my words carefully enough. The reason I want something like this is because I want to be able to use gmail with multiple machines without worrying about inconsistencies in my email. I am talking about creating an application that talks to gmail directly. Just a frontend UI that supports dragging and dropping and completely customizing the interface.





Yes, of course themes would have to be customizable. The simple theme would always be the default, however it would be great if they gave us the option. But of course themes are the least important suggestion in my list there. I would like to see some of the other ideas come to life first.

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I only use gmail now too and I think it's great, but your suggestions would make it even better.

but there's a grouse I have about gmail. My gmail accounts all get an incredible amount of spam mail. Even though they are all filtered rather effectively, it still baffles and annoys me. As I don't have my other email accounts anymore, I'm unable to do comparisons, but I remembered that I rarely got junk mail on my yahoo and hotmail accounts. then again, junk mails were not so much in fashion a couple of years back. I wonder if anyone's having the same issue with gmail as I do.

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Have you ever posted your gmail address on the internet anywhere, or used it to apply for a website that doesn't look too legitimate? There are spiders that crawl up websites looking for email addresses so any time you post your email in the clear anywhere on the internet you can pretty much bet that you will start to get tons of spam within the next week. Certain websites sell your information when you give them your email to others who use it to send you advertisements. I don't get any spam at all to my gmail account because I am very careful to only people I know personally, and websites of large companies such as ebay, paypal, etc... that I know will keep my information private. One great way to fight spam but at the same time receive emails from people you don't want to give your email to is by making aliases. Create a temporary email address that forwards to your primary one, and give out only the temporary one to people and businesses that you don't feel are very trustworthy. Then when you start getting massive amounts of spam being forwarded to that email address, stop the forwarding, delete the email address and create a new one with a different address. Yes the solution is a bit of work, however it allows you to keep your primary email free of spam and unchanged so you don't need to continuously email everyone in your addressbook that you have a new address due to spam.

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Really really good idea. I didn't think of it before.
And it's great that, even if you use your alias to register on a site, if after you have deleted the alias you want to log into that site again, you still have the log-in details (user, password) on an e-mail on your real address.
The only problem is you have to do that from the beginning, so it won't work on my current gmail address which receives 30 spams per day.



I think you get the same amount of spam regardless of account. Just the filtering differs.
I have a Gmail account and 2 YahooMail ones. I do receive less spam on the yahoo accounts, but it's just because whenever I have to register on a forum or a website, i use the gmail address.

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hey, I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression there! I was actually "using" your idea as a mere starting point to state my idea on labeling in gmail, which was not intended to go against your idea... yeah reading it back it might have sounded a bit like that though, sorry for that and yes, the idea of collapsing/hiding labels under a common group name makes sense, I also have the same "problem" with forwarded addresses labels, it will look a bit (just a bit!) like folders but it could be worthwhile...



again, I was just stating my own experience regarding this point, your idea of such a client is great! being synchronized virtually everywhere, on your primary machine, laptop and "on-the-go", including your own files... it probably goes beyond the idea of an email client, more like a desktop management tool which could surely be very useful if it were as efficient and easy-to-use as gmail! I'm wondering, though, if Google is willing to shift decisively from being an excellent web search engine to an all round software producer...

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