Gmail.com redesign leaks, looks pretty incredible
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I have a lot of labels for different things, with some emails being tagged with multiple labels through filters. As such, folders will not work for me as an email can only have one folder, but can have multiple labels.
What problems would folders solve that labels currently do not?
What problems do the current label system have?
NOTE: For item 3 on your list, I have rules that sorts incoming email into labels without them appearing in the Inbox. For example:
Includes the words: "list
kde-devel.kde.org)"Skip the Inbox (Archive it)
Apply the label: "kde/devel"
I then see those emails in the kde/devel "folder" (without the label) and in "All Mail" with the label, but not in Inbox. You can also apply the filter to all matching email you already have.
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Don't send email to people whose address ends in @gmail.com or encrypt your e-mail. .
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There are lots of business accounts with their own domain that still are Gmail. Also lots of people who just forward their mail from elsewhere to Gmail.
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Yes! One of our customers has a sig that's about 30 lines long that's auto-appended to every email that get sent out of his company's domain -- confidentiality statement, be-green-do-you-really-need-to-print-this? statement, and random "inspirational" quote from the company founder. It's a damn mess, and making it worse, he always bottom-posts his email replies, so if you have a long conversation, you end up scrolling through pages of the same legalese bull...
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Heh. I'm willing to blame lawyers for pretty much anything already, so OK.
Oblig. Lawyer Joke:
What do you call 100 lawyers trapped at the bottom of the sea? A good start!
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Serious question -- why folders instead of labels? I find labels to be much more flexible and easier to work with.
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too bad living in police states has robbed your ability to use capitals complete grammar and punctuation to make your rambling more coherent
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Had to give up Outlook and move to the web interface a long time ago. Outlook and the calendar sync tools were just too slow. Not that the web interface is fast, just faster than outlook. At least for me anyway.
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I'm right with you on 1 but most folks will screw it up somehow anyway. That's pretty much how encryption seems to go nowadays. :/
Labels allow for automatic deduplication so I sincerely doubt Google's going to go for that going away anytime soon. I have way too many clients using old email programs with folders who needlessly duplicate their emails into multiple folders for organization. Then they complain when their data files end up too big. You can use labels exactly like folders for the most part so I fail to see the real issue.
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It looks great but I wonder if the Multiple Inboxes labs feature will still work. That's been such an amazing feature for me. Ohh and keyboard shortcuts, though I don't have much hope for that.
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Gmail email is essentially one big flat file. "Labels" in Gmail are essentially "tags" that allow you to organize your emails by multiple categories. But while It allows for cross categorization, it can be an organizational mess.
Lets look at encryption. If for instance you wanted to encrypt an entire category of mails in Gmail, say, everything with the label "Recipes", you would be unable to do so if any of these mails were tagged with any other category, unless you set up rules to allow for encryption of emails in one category which would cascade to another category, but not all email in that second category. Or, a rule which would not allow the emails in Recipes to be encrypted if they were in another category.
(I wish I had a whiteboard to help explain this...)
"Folders" are the opposite in some way of labels. Unless you actually copy emails and add them into another folder, they would be restricted to one folder or another, but no more than one folder. So that flat file of emails would be broken up into specific blocks, but would not be accessible past that block. Security can be assigned to an entire block with some assurance that the data within them has those security measures assigned to them.
"Folders" are isolating, restrictive, while "Labels" are broad and flexible.
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Integrating the calendar with email... yay, another disaster I have to turn off.
"Smart" replies? Really? Another thing to turn off.
They *could* of course go back to the 2010 look and feel and feature set, and make all their users much happier. But why would they want to do that?
This is, as every "upgrade" to a Google product is, all about hopelessly connecting more and more baggage onto the basic tools that everyone uses, so that they are forced to endure all the revenue-generating drech that they hate.
"Smart" replies? Really? Another thing to turn off.
They *could* of course go back to the 2010 look and feel and feature set, and make all their users much happier. But why would they want to do that?
This is, as every "upgrade" to a Google product is, all about hopelessly connecting more and more baggage onto the basic tools that everyone uses, so that they are forced to endure all the revenue-generating drech that they hate.
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Whoa, take it easy there, Buddy. If you're not careful, you'll end up monologing.
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If it's anything like today's GMail, then comfortable means wide spaced lines, default is "normal" and compact is more tight spacing. In that way it makes sense, but maybe not best choice of wording.
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Reminded my of this fun story about a reply-all storm at Microsoft that took down Exchange for a couple of days: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exc ... 08/me-too/
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The filter rules apply the operations to the matching conditions. There is nothing in a label structure preventing the filter that applies the label to also have an "encrypt this email" option. Likewise, there is nothing in labels preventing there being additional actions like encrypting, or other security features.
The encryption functionality would work like "Mark as read", "Archive" and other filter-based actions. If any email is tagged with a label that has an encryption flag, or has a filter that has an encrypt flag set, I would expect that email to be encrypted irrespective of whether or not any other tags the email was associated with enabled encryption. In other words, the email has the union of the actions applied, not the intersection.
From a model perspective, there is nothing different between folders and a label system that is restricted to one tag per email. Or a folder system that supports emails in multiple folders and a label system. Hierarchical tags (folders) are already supported by gmail, so that isn't a problem either.
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Looks identical to before with better icons and stuff. And thank god for that. If they had changed the layout totally put whitespace everywhere and made it pretty and feature less I would have been quite pissed off
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I feel like smart replies make people think I'm more enthusiastic about things than I actually am.
Someone sends me a draft to review. Normally I would have typed out "This looks good. No changes." But it's so much less effort to send the "This is great!" or the "I love it!" comment that's pre-written.
Oh well. . .
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The ironic obliviousness of putting up a story about an interface design change with only text and one blurry image of a generic looking email screen is breathtaking.
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That's not how any of this works...labels don't prevent you from using email encryption in any way.
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I've loved Inbox from the moment I was invited to it. If I have a complaint, it isn't something frivolous like its "whitespace hellscape", but rather that I can't manually add or remove a set of emails from being lumped into Low Priority.
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Maybe they can redesign it to the way it was before they redesigned it.
I never got used to the flatness of the current design.
I never got used to the flatness of the current design.
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Speaking from personal experience and preference, I would also like to have true folders over labels. Starting out from Outlook and Thunderbird, the biggest change when I started working with GMail was the concept of labels. It is very clunky, and let me explain why I found that to be the case for my own work.
First, the e-mail ends up being in too many labels at once. Everything in the inbox is automatically labeled with an inbox label. Anything you do to that e-mail afterward seems to tack on a label. Searches end up producing unexpected results when some e-mails start belonging to multiple labels. This is especially true when you use filters. I have worked in a shop where we can expect anywhere between 50-500 daily event e-mails. These come from different sources and have different subjects and are for different purposes. They need to belong to exactly one location. GMail struggles very heavily with that concept. With a filter, it will attach the label, but another filter might pick it up as well and attach another one and you will never know because you have it set to "archive" i.e. just bypass the inbox. That's another can of worms right there. The terminology is really confusing regarding the archive. In some situations it may seem that when you remove the inbox label it is automatically archived, but I learned that to not be the case.
Anyway, I am rambling. Long story short(er), GMail treats the whole thing as a flat table of e-mails where you apply queries and tags to make it fit what you want it to display. Traditional e-mail applications though, work on directory structure, similar to OS. You move the file into a folder and that's that. You may have a rule to do that for you. Typically, you might not have to work too hard in finding an e-mail that may be lost, especially when you search a folder or a couple. Also, mass deleting/migrating/exporting/etc is much easier with directory structure as well.
A lot of this comes down to consistency. GMail's "move" for a long time did not even show up in the mobile client, it was all about changing labels... which is what the move function does... sort of since it also seems to auto-archive. It's a confusing mess, but that might be because they just need to standardize and not because its inherently bad. The labels didn't help me much, especially when filtering was concerned. This is on top of other labels that are introduced automatically for some reason, like "forum" and "chat".
I read in the comments that some people experienced duplication of e-mails when folders were around, but that actually requires purposeful duplication. In GMail, it could happen accidentally and you might not catch it until you have to look for something and its tagged with 3 or 4 things and you have to sift through a ton of e-mail.
Lastly, the method that GMail handles e-mails is the correct method from technological perspective and how most applications may handle it on the backend. It may even accelerate the whole process, sure since you are reading from a giant flat table, essentially. What I don't like is that it seemed to have brought that clunkiness to the frontend where the best experience you can have is when all of your e-mail stays in your inbox forever and has different labels. Don't these people know I get anxiety when I have anything in my inbox damnit!
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The mediocrity of mobile phones and the obsession of frivilous design tweaks is spilling over.
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In which situations is removing the inbox label not the same as archiving? I'm pretty sure the archive button is doing exactly that, removing the inbox label and nothing else.
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Speaking of that, I don’t like the integration of email and calendar in Outlook.
This got me thinking, can’t one just open google Calendar in another browser tab and then use them both simultaneously?
If this is true, is it really an improvement to return to MDI style interfaces?
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As long as the option to replace the button icons with text labels remains, I'm ok with it.
I've never understood the trend for UI designers to make things more cryptic and less discoverable, and squeeze things into hard to hit targets, especially when there is plenty of screen real estate.
I've never understood the trend for UI designers to make things more cryptic and less discoverable, and squeeze things into hard to hit targets, especially when there is plenty of screen real estate.
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"Adaptive design" means "mobile-compatible resources used for everything in slightly difference arrangements."
It's ostensibly to keep the same visual language across all screen sizes but honestly I think it's just done that way because it's easier to build.
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Minority, maybe. Alone? No.
I'm actually genuinely surprised to see ever-tighter integration of calendaring and emailing, because it's happening at the same time that communication is moving away from email. Why tie your calendar system to email when you might be setting up an event via SMS or Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger? Even at work, where email is our primary electronic communication method, a pretty significant chunk (maybe more than half?) of my directions to coordinate meetings come through a different communication channel (typically verbal or phone, sometimes Skype for Business). And I'm a secretary, so scheduling meetings is a pretty significant chunk of my work life. In my personal life I can't remember the last time a calendar-type thing was communicated to me via email.
So the fact that the one communication channel that is tied to a calendar is email seems just odd to me. Calendars should be their own thing--I no more want to go through my email to put an event on my calendar than I want to use my email client for Twitter.
I also don't want event invites cluttering up my email inbox. It's just due to a historical accident. There's no reason that we couldn't address calendars directly (it could still use SMTP, IMAP, or other email protocols, for all I care), rather than through the proxy of email. All it takes is an interface within the calendar client for creating meeting invites and for responding to them. Something that every electronic calendar I've used already has. It should be as easy to send a meeting invite via Signal as it is via email. It should be possible to have a calendar that is connected to the world without having an email address.
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The problem with folders is that you either lovingly stash away your mail into folders (but how? By sender? By project? And do you include your own sent mail or store them away elsewhere?) and then have two dozen places to hunt them down or you just leave everything in one place (your inbox). With labels you can sort them away after multiple criteria and still find them in one place.
Insisting in "folders" is the main thing that makes people hate email clients. Labels/tags are a solution to a real problem. Custom live searches (as smart folders powered by Spotlight in macOS, which are just great) are another.
Today I'd be totally happy with any system that stores away my mail by any system it may see fit as long as it allows me to tag and label my mail and create arbitrary views onto all of that. I just don't care where it really is as long as I can organize it on the fly. Folders are to email what rocks are to tools.
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A Google product redesign I don't reflexively hate? Christmas is early this year!
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Wait, a typeface where "m" and "rn" are indistinguishable at typical sizes is bad? /sarcasm
Helvetica was designed for signage. It should stay there.
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