Why I Can’t Use the Gmail Interface
Occasionally I find myself trying to explain why I can’t switch from one technology to another. Invariably, it’s been so long since trying to switch that I can’t remember the reasons why, and I end up unable to explain myself. One of the these technologies is Google Mail. While it’s on my mind, I thought I might document the reasons here before I forget again.
I’ve been using Google Apps for both work and personal Email for several years, and I love it for many reasons. The web-based interface does come in handy from time to time – it’s the only way to search for messages and administer the account – but, there are a few pieces of functionality implemented oddly enough that I can’t use it as my main interface for mail. So I continue to just use it as a back-end via IMAP with a mail client native to whichever operating system I’m using at the time.
Until last year, threaded messages was one of these stoppers. Thankfully, Google finally offered the option to turn that off. Google’s products often remind me of 37 Signals in that they believe they know more about what you need than you do. The result is that they offer limited configuration options; forced message threading was a glaring example of that.
But, that still leaves two annoyances I’m unable to move beyond…
1. The date on the message listing shows only the date, and not the time of day – unless the message was received on the current day. Further, if you want to know the time the message was received, it’s two clicks away. After viewing the message, you must click “show details”, as though the time of day the message was received is of little value. When trying to switch, I was amazed at how often I needed to know that, and how annoying it was when it wasn’t immediately visible in the message list. I would like the option of having something brief like “2011-01-01 2:37p” on each and every listing.
2. When replying or forwarding a message, instead of including the basic header info listed above the quoted original message, it only says, “On Jan 01 2011, Bob Smith wrote:”. The million dollar question this leaves is: who was copied on the original message? Am I really the only person who finds it highly useful to know who was copied on the original message? (Apparently so.) This really makes it feel like a toy rather than an enterprise level interface. And this isn’t just a problem with Google. Most free email clients, like Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple’s Mail client for OS X, have this same problem to one degree or another. Some will use the full header info with forwarded messages, but not replies.
Oddly, Microsoft seems to be the only maker of email clients that understands this. So in the meantime, I continue use Outlook on Windows, and Entourage on OS X. And there’s no decent equivalent for the Linux desktop the last time I checked – same problems.
There’s also the bigger issue of any web-based interface with not being able to just arrow down through each message in the list and see a full preview of the message, but I think I could get past that.
