Inventions to make life easier – Google – Gmail
Gmail has, over the years, intelligently avoided the problem of folders by using labels.
However, there are usability issues that they haven’t addressed yet, and hence remain unsolved –
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1 – No way to sort mails since inbox is sorted by date of receipt (latest to oldest) by default
This means if I want to see all mails grouped by a Sender or Sender Email ID, I have to use Search to filter them out.
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2 – No summary of who is sending how many mails to you
Let’s face it – the 7.5 GB inbox has stopped us from thinking twice before cluttering it.
What we need now is a basic summary table – grouped by Sender, with a count of emails received from each Sender. This summary table should be cross-tabbed across Date/Week/Month/Year to allow for sharper understanding.
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3 – Filters only allow inputs towards
- From
- To
- Subject
- Has these words
- Doesn’t have these words
Ideally, all permutations across the parts of an email and the Has/Doesn’t have strings should be covered, like this –
- From – Has these words
- From – Doesn’t have these words
- To – Has these words
- To – Doesn’t have these words
- Subject – Has these words
- Subject – Doesn’t have these words
- Body – Has these words
- Body – Doesn’t have these words
If possible, it should also have additional features like –
- cc – Has these words
- cc – Doesn’t have these words
- Attachments – Has these words in filename
- Attachments – Doesn’t have these words in filename
- Attachments – Has these words in file content
- Attachments – Doesn’t have these words in file content
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4 – Only one string input per box can be used while setting up a filter
This means that filters with multiple string inputs for a particular box will have to be set up separately.
At the first glance, that seems like a waste of time – however it might just be a more efficient easier-to-handle way of managing filters, which we will delve into later.
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