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Gmail Labs Lets Users Experiment With 13 New Features
D Ninja writes "Yesterday, Google released Gmail Labs, which allows Gmail developers to decide what to include in the next feature releases of Gmail based on user feedback. As ZDNet has pointed out, essentially users are guinea pigs for these new features. Participants will vote on their favorite new features, and the ones that are voted the highest will stick around and the ones that are least popular will disappear."
Reader physman_wiu points out an article at the BBC about the experiments on offer, writing: "Some of the features are really nice — like the option to use additional star icons, mouse gestures, and custom keyboard shortcuts. Others ... well, let's just say Old Snakey made it in."
All I want for Christmas is rich text (links, images) in my gmail signature... third party extensions do this but they are are a PITA
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Its a great way to waste time while you're "working"
[insert lame sig here]
Well, let's just say that I have no idea what "old snakey" is supposed to imply so why don't you just use plain english to tell me!
1) Doesn't work unless you use GMail in English.
2) Doesn't work unless you use Firefox 2 or IE 7.
Sorry, folks... work on it a bit more!
I have Google Apps for your domain, which I liked so much I wanted to pay for it. However, now that I have it seems I am "protected" from the bleeding edge settings.
I want to test these features, and see the bleeding edge technology.
I have selected the "Turn on new features" and "Automatically add new Google services", however it seems as though Google Apps is treated a bit like a secondary service.
Is the ad revenue generated more than me paying for the service? Are the services too different that they must use completely different infrastructure and so changes in one takes time to bring across to the other? Or, are the Google Apps aimed at people who really don't want new features and services?
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The new features are all very nice, but I would like to see Google to fix all the bugs* in their IMAP-Implementation first.
*)
http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation
Why do they want to base which features to keep on voting? Isn't the usage a much better measure to go by?
Offtopic:
The same applies to social networking sites, where the frontpages seems to be always based only on votes, while I think it should be based on votes, clicktrough-rate and number of comments; i.e. there are some great frontpage-worthy articles on reddit's controversial-tab with 0 points (500 upvotes, 500 downvotes) and 200+ comments.
The ability to display a few days of my calendar at the bottom of the message text box (while typing) is what I really miss. This feature is available with Yahoo mail by default. If there are important events coming up, you see these as they scroll...sweet! I hope they will implement it.
A small but practical improvement: automatically placing the signature before the included message in a reply.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
They could have done some real improvements such: - allow filters to disable antispam check for some messages and generally more filters options/actions - message sorting and they did Old Snakey instead?!?
I wish they'd add a direct way of importing into Gmail from some of the most used desktop clients (Eudora, Outlook, mbox). There are some utilities that claim to do this, but I don't trust them enough to give them access to my account and data. Gmail has most everything I need at this point, if they don't remove any features or don't screw up the current service, I don't see myself moving away from them.
For example, I regularly get a bunch of e-mails from an automated bot over which I have no control. For some reason the e-mail bot gives all sent mail the same subject line although the message contents varies. So GMail automatically decides to group these e-mails into few conversations (not one conversation but one per day or something like that). This in turn prevents me from handling these messages by tags, because tag scope is the whole conversation, not a single message.
The only solution for this is to handle these e-mails in Thunderbird via IMAP, where conversations don't exist and I can just take the messages and tag them one by one.
Like here ...
What I want is the support for external IMAP-based accounts. Currently one can only do that for POP-based. Only then I'll be able to ditch completely desktop mail apps (which suck a lot, btw).
var sig = function() { sig(); }
That said, I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis. I don't mind if that is the defaults but I'd like to be able to make other choices when it makes sense. I agree there are times when it's not the most appropriate basis for sorting mail and I would like to be able to choose.
I pay a few bucks a year for FastMail (fastmail.fm). No ads. Export/archive messages as a zip file. Good IMAP/SSL. Not AJAX-y but so what?
Am I the only one surprised at how many /.ers are using the web interface for email? After all, that's what MUAs and IMAP are for! I wouldn't dream of using my browser for that beyond the initial setup. I've put a lot of people on Gmail IMAP with mutt, TBird, Evolution, and Kmail. Aside from the winCE victims, why wouldn't everyone do it like this? Thumb drives are cheaper than ever, why risk your email account like that? Laziness?
Caveat Utilitor
How about a friggin' upload progress bar?
I've seen it done on other sites so I know it shouldn't be too hard for them to implement.
Why can't Google have upload progress bars on it sites, Gmail and Googlepages especially?
I still can't believe their contacts list doesn't let you choose multiple contacts and compose an email to that list. I'm also shocked that you still can't go to Compose Email and then bring up your contact list from the To: field and start selecting contacts.
If anyone knows this is possible and I'm just totally missing the boat here, please clue me in!
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Really? How dare they roll out their free additional features for their free product on their schedule. Don't the know everyone in the world is entitled to everything they do immediately?
It's gotta be simple to do, right? After all, you could do it in five minutes with your eyes closed and both hands jammed up your own ass to hold your head there.
Like when you get an email with a VCARD attachment? How about allowing me to save it in my contacts instead of just deleting it? Or a VCalendar attachment? A small button saying "Copy to calender"? Pretty pretty please please please?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I vote for opening up right clicking. I personally expect that I should be able to right click on just about anything within an online email client and be able to do some sort of action.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
If memory serves me back to a few years ago when I signed up for Gmail (back when it was invite only! haha. the good ol' days), the sign-up page had in big font something like "We do email differently!". So I'm not sure its fair to say they assume things too much and do what they want; from the beginning, they advertised the conversational email as a major feature that they were experimenting with (along with tagging and archiving instead of simply creating folders). Thus, you could fairly safely say that anyone that signed up for it was interested in the new interface. If you buy lots of cherry cola from a soft drink company, they're going to believe people like cherry cola and probably produce more. Same idea, at least to me, and I don't see how that's a wrong assumption to make.
That being said, it's popular enough now that there should probably be more customization options; but, maybe its a situation not often encountered? For instance, my Gmail is pretty good about sticking conversations together, so unless you tell them specifics on your problem, they may not even be aware it's a problem.
What I'd like is Folders - not pretty/ugly colored tags!
@peetm
All I really wanted was to be able to disable that f**king antivirus of theirs. I receive lots of mails with lots of por^H^H^Himages, and waiting for the antivirus to finish its work before being able to click "view all images" is a PITA.
They could at least allow administrators (gmail for your domain) to turn it off.
But aren't you getting exactly what you paid for?
If I was running a business that was based on Google Apps, I'd want them to stay as stable and predictible as possible. If things started breaking or becoming less efficient than I'd planned on because Google decided to throw a random test feature into the code base every 3 or 4 weeks, I'd get pretty annoyed.
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