Gmail isn’t set up this way for me, CS. My Reply, Reply to All, and Forward selections are at the top right of the email message. I don’t have to scroll at all to take action on a message. Perhaps yours is at the bottom because you’re in Conversation view (??)
Yeah. I’m not a fan of Conversation View at all.
I don’t know if there’s an easy way to do this. I guess one way to accomplish it is to ensure that all your email items have a label and do a search excluding a specific label. So, for example, say you want to do a search for an email from MaryJones, but want to exclude all the messages in your In Box. You could give all the items in your In Box the label: InBox and then put the following in the From field in your search: MaryJones -Label:InBox, which will search all your mail items that are from MaryJones but don’t have the label InBox. Yeah, I know, convoluted, but it works.
If you don’t like the web interface of gmail,why use it?
You can POP or IMAP your gmail account with you favorite emailclient or with a webmail service who’s interface you do like.
Awesome, thanks!
Wow, I have a lot of spam. And most of it is stuff I actually want to read.
Count me in among the conversation view haters. I’m also confused by all the options of labeling and stuff, and how I have to click “6 More” to go to Trash and the like.
I never changed the settings for viewing and such because a) I never knew that such options existed and b) nothing in the interface tells me that I have options. I’m looking at the interface right now and can’t see how to change anything. Even doing a page search for the text “Options” only highlights the “Show Search Options” link next to the search box at the top. The word “Settings” is nowhere on the page. Oh, it’s a tiny little picture in the corner? Thanks. Very intuitive that.
I never consider “Improvements” to the way things people are already used to doing to be very effective (a pox on MS Office and its lack of menus, too).
The new Yahoo! Mail interface is a lot better IMHO.
Settings used to be labeled a little more clearer before. They recently changed to that gear. But I have to ask - are you just not a very curious person? I use gmail every day. Even for programs I don’t use very often, the first thing I do is go through all the settings, and see what I can adjust. Is it fear of breaking something?
As much as I consider myself to be a tech-savvy person, I’m not an early adopter and I don’t care much for changes in my routine, which would include the things I normally do when checking my e-mail. When presented with something new, I almost always try to use it as presented to me, and the thought of going through settings only occurs when I’m trying to figure out how to get it to do something specific.
My primary use for Gmail is to communicate with my girlfriend in Europe, after her e-mails stopped showing up in Yahoo! Mail for some reason. I had created the account after I was forced to do so when setting up a new Android phone, and the Gmail notification on the phone turned out to be useful for that purpose so I know when she sends me a message.
For those of you bitching about “Trash” or whatever being hidden, you do know you can drag and rearrange labels in and out of the labels dropdown to your liking, right?
Yes, you can do this, and it is very easy to do. The complaint, however, if I understand correctly, is that it is not clearly evident how to do it.
Gmail is really powerful, and I admit that I do love it, but Google could do a much better job with making things more intuitive. They keep adding features, and I think that’s great, but they also, inexplicably, change things to make them more difficult. For example, I can understand the frustration caused by the change to accessing Settings or the sign-out link from one click away to two.
I like digging around and finding new ways to customize my user experience, but many don’t. It’s email. They just want it to work without having to figure things out, or enabling a ton of features.
Ah - yeah, secondary accounts (especially secondary clients) are tough to get up to speed on. One thing that Google allows you to do that Yahoo won’t that can help you out is forward every single e-mail from your girlfriend (and only your girlfriend) to your Yahoo account. This should work:
Go to Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
Click the “Add a forwarding address”
Enter in your Yahoo account, follow instructions (confirmation e-mail, yadda yadda yadda)
Go to “Create a filter”
In the “From” field put your girlfriend’s e-mail address
Select Continue
Check “Forward it to” and select your yahoo account
Your girlfriend will have to be careful about responding to anything you then send from your Yahoo account, so you may want to scrap this idea if that’s unlikely.
I use Gmail and it’s ok, but I too hate Conversation View. I much prefer Hotmail’s old ‘boring’ way. Thanks to whoever mentioned it could be changed. I had no idea-er.
Exactly.
I admit that I occasionally suffer from computer-screen blindness, where even something large and obvious might be invisible to me if it’s not where I expect it to be. I was experiencing exactly that when I was griping about the options button earlier. I’m sure Gmail is everything that everyone is saying it is. It’s just not designed in a way I’m used to.
So who knows, someday the light bulb will turn on in my head and discover the utility of these new features. I’ve already learned enough from this thread to at least tackle the settings and see if I can fix the things that annoy me.
That forwarding feature is also good to know, though I’ve already gotten used to Gmail being my “Girlfriend” folder. The problem with receiving her e-mail at Yahoo! seems to have fixed itself (several months after the switch, I received a couple of e-mails that she sent to the old address by mistake), but not before Gmail gained enough inertia to keep its niche.
I’ve used GMail for years, but I never found it to be superior to any other mail service. Currently my inbox has about 10,000 messages, because I find the labeling and archiving to be a pain in the ass.
I missed this on my first run through this thread.
The original idea, I thought, was that the inbox could basically be left untouched. Labeling is optional, as is archiving. The real strength of the system comes from, what else, the search box. You don’t need to have the emails individually organized because you can type in, say, the name of the person whose emails you’re looking for, and they’ll all just pop up.
Of course, labeling is a pretty powerful tool, and it’s excellent when used in conjunction with filters. But I’ve never seen it as necessary.
God, you all can pry gmail from my cold dead hands. I love the conversation feature. I don’t use the labels enough but that’s because I am lazy, I really love them. And the search function rocks.
I do that, too, but I don’t see why that’s a problem. I’ve never seen the purpose of archiving anything, and I only label things using filters.
Wht makes Gmail better is better Spam handling, the less clunky interface, the best filters I’ve ever seen, POP access, free text messaging and phonecalls, and the ability to customize out the wazoo. Nothing else I have used is even close.
The only problem I have is the ads taking up valuable screen space on my tiny screen, but I found a way to take care of that.
I haven’t used gmail so I don’t really know, but can’t you route them to a specific logical “folder” within trash?
The purpose of archiving is to take it out of the inbox. That’s all it does.
I like it better than other web-based e-mail interfaces, and better than Outlook, but I dislike using the trackpad. I wish they could find a way to enable the use of keyboard shortcuts.
I guess everyone loves using the mouse, which explains things like Chrome and the newer Microsoft programs.
gmail is the least intuitive email application I have ever seen. No button or menu is located where it would make sense. It seems it’s designed to make users find another mail application and switch to it.
who designed this piece of junk?