captsolo weblog

They say that GMail is much more useable that many other webmail systems. I can agree that its look & feel is nice, but it has problems, sometimes even characterised by stubborn determination to decide what is better for the users.

1. No actions on the search result set.

Imagine - I have >1000 messages from a mailing list in my inbox.
I need to move these messages to a 'label' and archive them.

The only way I have found I can do this in GMail is - search for all messages from a mailing list and repeat the sequence [ hit 'All' to select all 20 messages on the screen, assign them a label, archive, hit 'Next 20' ] more than 50 times.

It would have been nice if they at least offered to perform a filter on all existing messages. I have created a filter, so I would just run it and be OK. Even MS Outlook allows to do that. But no - you have to do it 20 messages at a time.

2. No shortcut for 'Move to Trash'.

Is it difficult to program? No.
But they just would not do that - you are not meant to delete stuff.
Even if you are absolutely sure you don't need it.

OK, there's the hard way - go to the menu and choose 'Move to Trash'.

But why not provide a shortcut?
Why not allow to perform actions on all matching messages?
I don't know.

3. You can't print draft messages.

This is more of a bug than real annoyance, but it limits your ability to use Gmail to keep to-do lists and other information you will need to update later on.

If you try to print draft messages in Gmail, you'll get an error message like this:

Gmail is temporarily unavailable.
Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. 
We're sorry for the inconvenience.