
What happened, Gmail? - xoxoavi
https://uxplanet.org/what-happened-gmail-e5f35e423b1b
======
tgb
The author's experience with GMail seems to be the opposite of mine. The new
features for disappearing/unprintable/etc. emails sound like they're just
going to cause annoyances while Gmail sorting things into promotions and
updates is _absolutely fantastic_. And I use the "forums" tab too. This _is_
the "good method for telling users what they need to read" that the author
wants - that's what Primary is. This _is_ the way to help manage the number of
emails you get. This _is_ the efficient way to categorize and sort the emails
that you get. It's really not Google's fault that you've got 6gb of emails in
the promotion and updates tabs without realizing it - they've been prominently
showing you the new emails you've received in those tabs every time for years
now.

Here's the feature I keep wishing for in Google: when I attach a file, it
should let me rename the file. I want to store it on my compute with a name
that's meaningful for me and to send it to someone with a name that's
meaningful for _them_. Eg: I want to have cv_google.pdf for my copy of my CV
that I'm sending to Google for a job application but I want to have them
receive it as cv_tgb.pdf to know that it's from "tgb". Similarly, when I
download a file I want to be able to rename it.

~~~
8ytecoder
I have been using Google Inbox since the launch and I absolutely LOVE it. It
finally solved my email problems.

\- I have notifications disabled for all but the important emails. So I
respond to emails in time and I don't keep checking my phone anymore.

\- Easy to read and discard emails. Especially promotions. I actually do check
them - once a day and once a day only and then delete them all.

\- Social/Updates ...etc are neatly organised. I check them during a downtime
and not often. They don't alert me.

\- Organising emails by trips are great. I can find all the relevant emails in
one bundle.

\- Absolutely love the GTD features - Marking as Done and Snoozing emails. My
Inbox is always zero. I use that as pretty much a task manager as well.

Overall, classification of emails make emails actually usable for me. I used
to be meticulous with creating email rules and filters in Outlook so I get to
the ones I need to and ignore the rest for my sanity. Now it's done
automagically and pretty spot on.

~~~
freehunter
My problem with it is that I don't trust it. Outlook does the same thing, I'm
not singling Google out for this. Anything that automatically sorts my email
for me, I don't trust it to get it right 100% of the time. And the last thing
I want to do is a miss a critical email because Google or Microsoft told me it
wasn't important to me.

Case in point: I run a website for my town and some user actions are sent to
me via SendGrid emails. Not a lot, but maybe one or two per day. I've made the
email subject descriptive enough that I rarely need to open them to know what
happened. I'm guessing that because it's a mailer from SendGrid and that I
rarely open them, my email provider decided that they weren't important emails
and stopped sending them to my inbox. When I figured it out a few days later
and went to check the other tab, I found a couple messages had been sent of
people wanting to purchase ad space that the email provider had also decided
wasn't important enough to notify me of.

So now I have to check both tabs religiously (in reality I just turned it off)
because I can never trust that I'm not missing something.

~~~
zamber
The idea with whitelisting is viable. Use a
freehunter+superimportant@gmail.com email for these and then in the classic
interface set a filter that will land these mails always in your inbox with an
additional label.

Been doing this kind of categorizing with filters since I discovered the
feature and never looked back.

~~~
freehunter
But then that's no better than just managing my email by hand. The whole point
of these smart inboxes is to not have to do that.

~~~
zamber
In my setup there are no blanket rules. Only super important and especially
annoying stuff gets the filter treatment. All the rest is autosorted.

------
pmlnr
Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially
hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your
email.

The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of
"hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There
should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this
level. When there's 17k mails in promotions, eating up 6GB alert them, let
them know. (This ties back to how WordPress keeps hiding anything technical
from users, which is also bad[^1])

Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No
option to match on custom header, seriously?

Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to
Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

I'm aware of all the arguments against email, but so far nobody could come up
with a robust, reliable (see SMTP retries), async, world wide, federated
solution, that even touches the level of email.

Here's a revolutionary idea: instead of trying to come up with a new email,
stop breaking the current one, and keep using it.

[^1]: [https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-
responsibility/](https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/)

~~~
Waterluvian
If I want to take my 20GB of email out of Gmail and put it elsewhere for the
next 15 years without having to think about it, where do I go?

~~~
peatmoss
You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail
(or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if
Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future.

When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today.
My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to
Fastmail.

Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintain email
portability over time. Namecheap is a good, easy registrar. I moved to them a
while back and was impressed at their documentation and help during that
domain transfer.

~~~
Waterluvian
Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my
address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You
attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible.
Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the
same way.

~~~
peatmoss
Yes, I’d forward emails until you can get everyone trained over to using your
new email address. I’ve done that in the past with mostly inactive emails that
I got through professional or academic associations. Presumably Gmail still
makes auto-forwarding reasonably easy.

~~~
distances
Why not just leave the forwarding on? I still have my first e-mail address
from the 90s forwarding all incoming mail to my current one, though it's very
rare by now that anything comes.

~~~
peatmoss
You could! The only reason not to is if you wanted to close the account for
some reason.

------
pferde
Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users
what’s important to read and what can wait for later."

To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what
is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding
good, apparently.

~~~
praseodym
Just as scary as having Google filter out mail that is totally not important,
i.e. spam?

In Gmail you can (un)label email as being important, which will then train an
algorithm just like a spam filter. Besides that, it will learn to recognise
email you reply to often as being important.

I very much like this feature; I set up the Gmail app on iOS to only send me
push notifications for important mail. For me that strikes a good balance
between no distractions and not missing out on important email.

~~~
stephenr
Spam can be removed by objective filters, that simply classify the email
against known patterns/rules. Who you are or what you like is irrelevant to
them.

This is not that: it's you, giving a giant personal information sponge, a
bigger tap.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Spam can be removed by objective filters,_

Those "objective filters" prevent me from sending email from home (I have to
relay through a non-residential IP).

I receive about a dozen spam email per day (with occasional surges and
lapses). My server accepts everything, and a simple local filter from my mail
user agent (Evolution or Thunderbird, mainly) let few through, and false
positives are very rare.

I'm not sure why the giant providers need to work any differently.

~~~
Yetanfou
A dozen spam messages per day? Lucky you. I did a tally on yesterday's harvest
on my server and found the following:

\- 57 rejected messages designated as spam by SpamAssassin

\- 137 greylisted messages, most of which will end up being spam as those
addresses which I communicate with regularly will be in the whitelist.

\- 181 connection attempts blocked at the gate due to protocol violations
(most of them due to fake HELO, usually trying to connect using my own
server's FQDN)

\- 144 delivery attempts blocked at RCPT due to the use of blacklisted
recipient addresses. This is why using recipient-specific sender addresses
makes sense when communicating with commercial, organisational or governmental
institutions: it makes it possible both to track down who leaked or sold
addresses to spammers as well as to block those addresses entirely.

This domain has been handling mail for close to 23 years now, the server is
used daily by about 8 people, it also forwards mail for a few others.

I generally don't see more than one or two spam messages per week in my actual
INBOX.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Ah, 8 people. If we remove the protocol violations, we get (57 + 137 + 144) /
8 = 42 spam message per person per day. Between 3 and 4 times my amount. I may
be lucky, but frankly that doesn't sound extraordinary.

I also get no more than 1-2 spam message per week in my inbox.

------
therealmarv
Extra First Class World problems: Inbox is not optimized for iPhone X.
Everytime I read this I cringe.

How about the thought that your phone broke common UI behaviour and not your
software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture.

I'm sure very soon Inbox will support iPhone X. But there are many other
problems in Inbox which I see more important like Unspam emails without Gmail.

~~~
matwood
> Inbox is not optimized for iPhone X.

This has led me to think Inbox is on its way out. Lack of updates is the
classic Google move prior to killing a product.

~~~
spookthesunset
> This has led me to think Inbox is on its way out.

Any time an app takes forever to update to a new apple screen resolution is a
good indicator the app is on its way out.

I mean, think about it.... if you were all-in on your app, wouldn't the
highest priority fixes on your backlog be "get the damn thing to run in the
native resolution of your target device"?

------
ex3ndr
Article is a little bit biased as a one who worked on messaging apps claiming
that messaging (eg Slack) solve communication is just wrong. Outlook
screenshot is very simple and clean but... it mentioned as an example of
nightmare.. Looks like author got in the his own bubble just like google.

~~~
ex3ndr
> An efficient way to categorize, filter and search content.

No, no one likes to categorize emails, this is work for someone else or for
power users that's not a case for GMail.

> A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the
> wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly.

For a long time Telegram didn't want to introduce this feature since if you
sent something this should be in other's inbox. If someone can modify your
inbox than you won't be able to trust that some random email won't disappear.

> Allowing users to handle their business better through Gmail (e.g. sign
> documents, approve things, review things).

Uh, guy just want to put everything to GMail while claiming that this is not
an "innovation".

> Allowing users to design their emails in a better way.

Do you want to receive emails from your lawyer in comic sans? There is a
reason why FB, Slack, Telegram, etc don't allow you to style your text easily.

> Letting users know if someone read their presentation and what parts
> interested them (DocSend).

Breaking fundamental flow of an email. No one will see if you read and no one
will be upset. There are a reason why slack dosen't have read status.

GMail probably have a lot of problems now, but (sorry) this all just
unprofessional judgment.

~~~
xoxoavi
I think these suggestions make some sense since they are still problems that
exist. The way you'd imagine solving them could be different if you were on
that team, with the data and would iterate to find the solution. The bullet
points under the innovation section are not suggestions for solutions, on the
contrary, they are problems that users still have. For each of these problems,
there are services that are trying to solve that problem. Take scheduling a
meeting as an example. Google's solution was to bring the calendar into Gmail
and increase complexity. X.AI's solution is to make a bot that coordinates.
Some other companies will have different solutions. The point is, what is the
best solution for a user who is in the frame of mind of emailing. It is very
easy to stuff things from different places one on top of another and it's
called sustained innovation (if I'm not mistaken). But what ideally should
happen is finding new ways to adapt these extra services, including these
problems in a way that is matched with the main use case. Otherwise, it gets
complex.

------
rangewookie
I created an account to comment on the good experience I was having with the
update.

I did a side-by-side comparison of the old UI and the new UI and I've changed
my stance. The old one is a better "email" UI, but google is trying to mature
the email experience.

A big problem here is that email showing it's age. Google is eager to hide
less common tools behind menus. They want to delete all of the old "manual"
buttons/tools so their smart filters can take over. It wont work. The truth is
everyone likes email because it's fairly consistent, but we're forever trapped
in 90's tech.

Instant messengers have transformed the way that we communicate, but email
hasn't caught up. Maybe... it shouldn't.

~~~
pmlnr
> email experience

Email, at this point, is infrastructure. There is no need for an "experience"
with it.

------
legohead
What got me is they moved the archive button. I have been trained to click on
the email, move my mouse up a few pixels, and click archive. Now when I do
that, my cursor resides on the spam or delete button. Oops! I don't think the
Google of yesteryear would have made that mistake -- the google that designed
Chrome closing tabs to stay the same size so you could close multiple tabs
quickly.

------
GordonS
Something I really hate about Gmail is the way it places attachments at the
bottom of the page. So if I open a long thread in which the latest email had
an attachment, I've got to scroll down to the bottom to locate it - it's so
unintuitive that I often find myself scanning the page looking for the
attachment.

------
axiomdata316
I feel with each Gmail "improvement" Gmail gets slower. I miss the days when
Google’s priority was speed and not pretty. I feel less productive when I'm
always eating for pretty Gmail to load and respond to actions in the ui.

------
ggm
It flickers. It animates. It's annoying. Thank goodness they did not break
keyboard shortcuts.

It's more intrusive as a gui than the old one.

~~~
pmlnr
As long as google keeps the imap and pop3 gateways alive, we have a choice.

Use them, utilize other webmails, even run it localhost, like rainloop;
desktop clients, like geary, evolution, claws, thunderbird; command line, like
mutt.

Don't let the gmail interface drive the way you want to deal with email.

~~~
TheDong
Their imap gateway is nonstandard to say the least. The labels vs folders
thing is already a mess, but it also speaks a protocol that is just different
enough from regular imap that most clients (e.g. thunderbird) have a different
implementation with quirks for google-imap.

Using those clients is sub-standard with google's imap implementation, and
switching between them is more painful due to how each one handles googles
"labels not folders" quirk

~~~
pmlnr
This is true, I'm well aware of this, but at least there's still a choice.

Unfortunately nothing is truly stopping Google to pull a Slack move and close
the gateways... unless the amount of IMAP/SMTP users are significantly higher,
than we know, or that those users are tech influencers Google don't dare to
loose.

~~~
erichurkman
I would wager that G Suite users will keep IMAP/SMTP alive via Outlook and
other enterprise deployments.

------
bobinux
Is it just me or does the new Gmail UI feel sluggish/unresponsive? Scrolling
the mail list is lagging a bit, the left side menu takes time to initiate the
appear animation and the animation itself is too fast. When hovering the mouse
over mail list, the interaction icons do the lagging effect, which is really
not nice for eyes.

However the right side menu for Tasks, Calendar and etc. is nice, I like
having them in one place instead of keeping multiple diff tabs open.

I'm not sure if this lag effect is intentional or a performance problem, maybe
React instead of Angular could help :D

------
tehabe
Inbox looks really nice and is (to me) very simple and I kinda wished Google
would have uses Inbox as a template because Inbox has also two things which
makes my life really hard: 1 I can't sent emails to groups in my contacts and
2 in the Sent folder it doesn't say to whom I've sent the email but that I
sent them, which I already know.

Both issues are also true for the Gmail application on Android.

------
ino
It's also slower. The scrolling is choppy and I shouldn't need a top of the
line computer to scroll smoothly through some emails.

------
roberttod
I just went through my Inbox to figure out why I still use email.

For personal stuff, I think WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessages are clear winners.
90% of my emails seem to be marketing I'll never read or notifications I
ignore. I try my best to unsubscribe, but email really needs maintenance to
work nicely.

For work almost everything is Slack. Sales team and a few others still seem to
use email for some reason. Email is vital for communication with clients and
it's pretty good for a big announcement where you can then choose to "reply
all" or "reply", not sure Slack solves that nicely with threads. Also email
seems to be used for anything considered too important for Slack, but I can't
see any good reason why it should be that way.

When you boil it all down, it looks like a lot of use of email is for legacy
reasons, i.e. some people still insist on using it. There is legitimate
usefulness over other options when it comes to communicating between companies
though. Even if Slack figured out a way to fix that, they'd probably require
the reciever to be paying for Slack.

I guess the ability to send a stranger a message is email's weakness and it's
strength. Nothing out there has solved that yet.

~~~
leetcrew
an email address and a phone number are still the only things you can safely
assume everyone has. for many of my older relatives and non-tech
acquaintances, the only options are email, sms, or phone calls.

i dislike phone calls in general for all but the most time-sensitive and/or
intimate conversations. i get a bit anxious on the phone and i don't like
being essentially blocked for the duration of the call.

i dislike sms because i don't have an iphone, so i cannot respond using a full
sized keyboard without using workarounds like pushbullet, which i don't feel
like setting up for the small number of people who insist on using sms.

i don't love communicating via email but i would contest the claim that it is
a legacy technology on the basis that it does not have a clear successor.

there is no modern service that matches the ubiquity of email; the penetration
is unequaled even by the likes of facebook. i would also point out that
(personal) email addresses provide highly stable means of communicating with
infrequent contacts. while people's phone numbers change over time, people
seem to accumulate personal email addresses and at least forward the old ones
to their main account. if i got someone's personal email address five or even
ten years ago, i have a pretty good chance of reaching them today. on the
other hand, i assume that phone numbers that i haven't used for a couple years
are dead links. with messaging apps, you don't always have a clear indication
of whether the person currently has the app installed with notifications
enabled.

------
sssparkkk
Been thinking of switching back from Inbox to Gmail for one single annoying
and IMO stupid design decision: if there are multiple recepients for the email
the main reply button will by default perform a reply all. Had me look like a
dork a few times, replying to everyone that I can't make it to a party or
something.

Anyone else been bitten by this?

~~~
hokoto
I think the party host who is sending his invitations without using bcc is to
blame here.

I use gmail mainly for business related mails and the default reply-all makes
a lot sense - almost all the time other recipients ( managers, clients etc)
are there to be kept in loop. If you forgot and just reply to it, then you
have send the same mail again - or worse you never notice it.

~~~
sssparkkk
The party host is not using bcc because he/she wants everyone to be aware of
who has been invited to the party.

I guess it boils down to your default usage of email; I've never had an email
client before Inbox that does 'reply all' by default.

------
dheera
Where is this "unprintable e-mail" and "self-disappearing e-mail" feature? I
don't see the options on my Gmail. I would love to write a Chrome plugin to
destroy these features.

Once information enters my premises, I do whatever the hell I want with it as
long as I'm not sharing it with others or violating any NDAs. In particular,
you do not get to define the media and methods I use to access, consume, and
save information. You just get to send me a binary number containing
information, and it's your choice whether you want to do that or not. That's
it.

If you don't agree to me having personal freedom, don't send me information
and don't contact me.

------
Froyoh
Between the Gmail and Reddit redesigns Reddit's redesign was so much worse.

------
alkonaut
Those that don’t use inbox, why? I’m sure there are features of gmail that are
missing from inbox but what are they? Why do Google keep these two “forks” of
the same product?

~~~
achamayou
I find the lack of visual density and regularity in Inbox very annoying. Gmail
(compact) fits 3/4x times more emails on the same screen, with a single text
line of identical size for each. It's very quick and easy to scan through.

Inbox looks like a jumbled mess to me, with randomly sized images and pre-
rendered images, and it makes me scroll a lot more.

Annoyingly, the new UI is slightly less dense than before, but it's still much
better than Inbox.

~~~
alkonaut
I think the key idea behind inbox is that you don't have more than say 5 or 10
emails in your "to do" view. I never had to scroll. I only look at the inbox
view (i.e. things I need to deal with) - and that is always fewer than one
screen. If I need something from the "already dealt with" screen I do a
search, never a visual scan. This might be due to the volume of emails
received obviously, but that's why I was wondering. It might also depend on
the usage pattern, e.g. I reply to probably fewer than 1 in 100 emails for
example.

If I had more emails, or more emails I actually had to address by replies, it
might be different. I never noticed the "images" in inbox though. Are those
for things like purchases or travels that it renders differently? My emails
just look like subject lines, with about the same density in inbox as in
classic gmail (Quick check: An inbox email on desktop is a 32px div with 6px
padding, while a gmail email is a 39px table row - so quick estimate is 5px
more per email for inbox)

~~~
achamayou
Yes, for some reason Inbox expands some attachments inline for me, and pre-
renders some links (with a picture from the page a short summary). It doesn't
seem to do it systematically, and it could be something that can be turned off
in options (it didn't seem to be when I first checked). It seems to pick the
most useless items for expansion (recurring bills! 150px vertically for this
month's G drive bill!).

A quick an dirty screenshot-on-my-current-machine shows inbox compact emails
at 60px vertical, vs 50 for the new gmail. All of the difference seems to be
whitespace, the fonts are more or less identical. There's extra waste for
"Today" and "This month", and with a couple of expanded pictures, I can't even
fit 10 emails vertically on my screen (MB 12"). Gmail shows 20 emails in the
same space just fine.

It's quite possible that if you have just the right volume of email, the Inbox
format is perfect. It's also possible that most people don't mind scrolling.
Me though, I like to see as much as I possibly can at a glance.

------
naveen99
My gripe is when I star something in gmail it shows up 3 times in my outlook
todo list. I suppose it’s partly microsoft’s fault.

Hmm maybe there is a fix: [https://www.msoutlook.info/question/copies-in-
important-fold...](https://www.msoutlook.info/question/copies-in-important-
folder-gmail)

------
spinchange
I don't understand replacing the onmouseover shortcut to all mail from/to a
given address with shortcuts to other google apps actions (add to contacts,
compose, schedule event, hangouts, etc.) I'm mostly a keyboard shortcut person
but that's a mouse action I use all the time.

------
rayiner
While we are griping, the mobile website is complete crap on iOS, constantly
mistaking the initial touch to start a swipe motion. So you accidentally open
emails while trying to scroll through them. I’ve never seen any other website
do this, so I’m assuming someone got too clever.

~~~
mhuffman
Youtube (another Google product!) does this and it is infuriating! The youtube
iOS app is utter garbage, but the site itself is nearly unusable because of
the initial-touch mistake.

------
jordan_
I moved from gmail to fastmail and am much happier.

------
dejournal
I like the new design.

My only issue is that the sidebar expands when I mouse over it. Does anyone
know if this can be fixed so just the icons show?

------
dvfjsdhgfv
What about sorting e-mails? By size, for example?

~~~
benrbray
I think that's a very uncommon use case and I can't think of a time I've ever
wanted to do that. I've sorted by "has-attachment" but why would you need to
sort by size?

~~~
rrdharan
Well it becomes important when your .PST file is about to hit the 2GB limit
and you need to find large attachments to delete.

[https://www.lifewire.com/outlook-pst-files-size-
limit-117334...](https://www.lifewire.com/outlook-pst-files-size-
limit-1173344)

(NB: I’m being facetious, and agree with you - this, 15ish years ago, is
really the last time I remember needing to sort by size)

------
jimmies
I'm sure the Gmail team has done great research on this, and this might have
worked for the majority of the users, but just not for some power users such
as Hacker News readers. And I think, that's because we might have one false
belief, that is User Experience/User Interface is one big, beautiful,
monolithic top of the mountain everyone wants to reach. It is not: Power users
and the normies might have different needs. A normie like your mom and mine
don't know how to turn off annoying notification emails from Facebook, so they
might need a tool to help them hide spammy emails. They need something easy to
hit, hard to miss, because they use their fingers to point. But you and I use
keyboard shortcut and know exactly not to give our serious email addresses
away, we don't need that.

An UX that is great for your mom and mine might be bad for you and I.

I noticed that on one of my project that got on Hacker News and Hackaday, then
got viral on reddit and media and such a week or so later. It has both a
github and a couple of videos linked on the site. What I noticed from my
rudimentary Cloudflare log and Youtube analytics was that the HN crowd read
and looked at the github, but most didn't watch the video. The normies crowd
watched the video, but most didn't read. To me, it was kinda funny.

I think that's part of the crisis that GNOME 3 suffered lately. I seriously
tried GNOME 3 for a while and their macOS approach - simplify, trying to make
good choices by default - genuinely sucks for me. I want to see my options,
don't hide them away from me. I want to be able to make choices. The problem
that the GNOME 3 team doesn't realize is that their users aren't made up of
majority normies. They are the ones who are savvy enough to install a Linux
distro on their desktop. They are the ones that will go great lengths to
customize something to make it work exactly the way they wanted. And GNOME 3
fails to deliver that [1].

At first when I worked on my project, I wanted to create something very simple
that "just works." As time went by, it turned out to me many of my users, the
ones that stick and support my project aren't the ones that just install and
forget. They read the docs, wiki and the source code to tease out what I was
trying to do. So I realized having a great, updated wiki is a very valuable
asset. It takes great pain to do it, but it is worth it.

The problem with project that are extremely popular like Gmail is that you
tend to carter for the mass. But are they loyal? Are they the ones that
actually use and love your product? Are they the ones that influence other
people's choices? I think those are the questions worth asking and considering
when designing products.

1:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8etezq/_/](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8etezq/_/)

~~~
pmlnr
> so they might need a tool to help them hide spammy emails.

They need a tool to make the source of the spam stop spamming them, not a tool
to hide this. Sweeping the dirt under that carpet is not an actual solution or
fix.

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finchisko
Also what genius decided that left menu will slide on mouse hover when there
is hamburger icon for that.

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blarg1
when gmail started filtering my emails I just deleted all the
filters/tabs/whatever. Though it took me bit to figure it out.

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fiatjaf
I don't understand people complaining on free services. I believe it's
something you can do, but not as seriously as this article makes it sound.
Gmail is a toy.

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make3
the new self erasing and unprintable emails make me really hope we can opt out
of the new gmail.

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senectus1
the missing bloody contacts is driving me nuts, otherwise its ok i guess.

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ehosca
does the new design allow me to sort my emails in date order received?

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nukeop
Material Design is one of the worst things that ever happened to the design of
websites, not only Google's but everyone's, since now so many are trying to
copy it. I have no idea why anyone would want to see it anywhere.

~~~
chenster
Couldn't agree with you more. We should have a drink :)

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EugeneOZ
Better than Inbox, anyway.

~~~
Froyoh
Better than Reddit's redesign

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chenster
@google, check this: [https://dribbble.com/shots/4020485-Inbox-
Client/attachments/...](https://dribbble.com/shots/4020485-Inbox-
Client/attachments/921027). It's better than yours.

Never a fan of material design.. seriously, Google is NOT good at design.
Period. I hoped, in this Gmail iteration, Google would finally take the plunge
and kill the flat icons and minimalist design and once for all. It's quite the
opposite unfortunately. It got flatter and uglier. All so plain and washed
out, one doesn't know what he should look at first.

~~~
andrewguenther
That design is...awful. Tons of wasted space, prominent screen real estate
given to interactions the user will never engage and less than 50% of the
screen is given to the content I am there to see?

> one doesn't know what he should look at first.

Pot, meet kettle.

~~~
chenster
So what I heard is that people would just prefer something like the
Thunderbird, basic but functional - [https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-
media/previews/full/152/...](https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-
media/previews/full/152/152814.png?modified=1458845197) and you don't care if
it's ugly. However, You can't just think like gmail are only used by engineers
who designed it. Most of the users are not.

