
The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/the-greatest-google-mail-feature-you.html
======
dlss
I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading.
This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then
reply again to get my desired behavior.

In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the
definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused
me to stop reading their site.

~~~
hartror
Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual
selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those
not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't
understand.

~~~
scrumper
> habitual selectors

Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case
become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.

HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and
gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very
satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if
you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment
and the next.

~~~
georgeott
Curious... Why are you selecting? Is it to assist in reading, or some other
reason?

~~~
cardamomo
I often select text so that I have an easy visual reference when I'm scrolling
down. I don't want to scroll too far!

~~~
guiambros
I do exactly the same. For me it's not really _selection reading_ , but
_selection marking, when scrolling_.

------
cousin_it
The greatest gmail feature you're not using is probably "Undo Send", if you're
not already using it. I have it set to the longest possible timeout of 30
secs, and would like an even higher value.

~~~
Torrents
That feature has saved me a couple times. As has the "I see you mentioned an
attachment, but there is nothing attached" feature.

------
Matt_Cutts
The greatest feature for me is Send and Archive:
[http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-in-labs-send-
archi...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-in-labs-send-archive.html)

~~~
Trufa
That is in fact a brilliant feature, but the one I like the most is the
sending undoing, saved me lots of times.

BTW, are you the Google Matt Cutts?

~~~
cloudwalking
Yes he is.

~~~
Trufa
Thanks! It's actually pretty amazing that in this day and age you interact
quite closely to a lot of pretty influential people that some years ago, the
equivalent would have been completely un-reachable.

~~~
cloudwalking
Indeed. HN is surprisingly full of important hackers. The "Internet famous."

------
mibbitier
This is a horrible misfeature.

Often, I select bits of an email, to copy and paste elsewhere to check things.
Then I hit reply, and wonder why only the currently selected text is there.

There should be a way to turn this "feature" off.

~~~
jemka
Thunderbird does the same thing and I agree with you. I've learned to just hit
reply, then edit.

~~~
vvhn
mail.app on OS X also does this ( can be turned off i think ) and its always a
similar annoyance to me ( select something to copy paste and the reply only
has that)

------
philwelch
This feature is also present in Apple Mail, which is fortunate because ever
since Apple Mail caught up to Gmail's last remaining interface enhancement
(having an "archive" button), the greatest Gmail feature _I_ use is IMAP
access.

------
hackmiester
Wow, great, a condescending title! Fact is, I _am_ using this. It used to be
in the settings, I think, which is how I found out about it. And as others
have stated, it's in a lot of mail clients. Apple Mail supports this, as does
the iOS mail app, too.

"I haven't heard of this feature" != "no one knows about this feature".

~~~
trhtrsh
Wow, I gave jgc credit for the non-obnoxious title, and then I realized that
the title is obnoxious, but the HN gods improved it.

~~~
jgrahamc
I agree, that is a better title. I've changed the post title to match the HN
title.

~~~
morsch
So, for posterity's sake, the original title was...?

~~~
jgrahamc
The greatest Google Mail feature you are not using

------
acangiano
In a related note, I hate how Google promotes top posting even when I select a
specific quote.

~~~
jjwiseman
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some
point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural
significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)

~~~
mhd
There's no big difference if the quoted part is small enough and you're
replying in one go (although I'd argue that even there it breaks the historic
flow of the conversation).

It is a big of a hassle if you want to reply to parts of the original post,
Usenet-style (y'know, before "Usenet" meant "less traceable file sharing").
There having the answer atop of each single paragraph you're responding to is
seriously weird, it's like playing Jeopardy with email.

Never mind that breaking up quoted text into parts is pretty buggy with gmail,
due to the absence of quote chars (replaced by those colored bars).

------
AceJohnny2
That's interesting. Thunderbird has been doing this for a while, and I love
it.

~~~
masklinn
Same for Apple Mail.

I definitely don't love it:

1\. I'm one of those serial overliners which will randomly select text and
paragraphs while reading, so half the time I end up with a completely useless
piece of quoted text.

2\. I craft mail responses by quoting all the original mail, interspersing
responses and cutting the stuff I don't care for afterwards, very rarely do I
only need to quote a single contiguous block of text without _anything_ else,
unless the single contiguous block of text is "all of the original mail"
anyway.

~~~
zxzd
In apple mail you can actually turn this off! (Settings, bottom of the
composing tab.)

\- another selection reader

~~~
albemuth
As someone who always has to close the original reply, deselect the text and
hit reply again, thanks!

------
davidw
That's neat. I used to cut down emails by means of ctrl-K in my browser,
which, being mapped to emacs keys, means "delete this line". However, in their
brand new email compose thing, Google has seen fit to override this, making
that key combination point to "make a hyperlink" or some such BS, causing me
much, much frustration. Yes, I know, you can still utilize the old way of
doing things... but for how long until they decide that it's simply got to go
and it's time for you to upgrade.

I guess RMS has a point.

~~~
stephengillie
Why aren't we able to rebind these keys at will? Why is it hardcoded?

We've been able to rebind keys in videogames for a long time. Why can't we
rebind ctrl+o to be cut, ctrl+t to be undo, and ctrl+k to be "delete this
line"?

Why can't we have ctrl+v be one clipboard and ctrl+f be a different one?

~~~
coldpie
Web developers are in the process of re-inventing everything that the desktop
solved in the 90s. Meanwhile, the desktop is in the process of destroying
everything it solved in the 90s. Ah, progress.

------
justindocanto
I'm confused why this is on the top of the front page.

~~~
arctangent
I'm guessing that a lot of HNers spend a lot of time in their Gmail account,
and that this functionality (which was news to me) was perceived as a
significant time saver and judged to be worth sharing with the rest of the
community.

~~~
justindocanto
I guess i just knew about it already and didnt find it ground breaking enough
to be on the front page.. but hey, your reason makes sense and i dont have to
agree with everything. =P

------
languagehacker
That's a feature in Mail.app, too. Does that mean I should write a blog post
about it? Will it get to the front page of Hacker News? Will it get to the
top? What if I say it's the best feature you're not using on Mail.app? I'd be
wrong, but people would still go to my site, right?

I honestly think HN should be doing more about linkbait like this.

------
kirpekar
That's the one feature I hate.

I usually read through emails highlighting (selecting) the important parts
with the mouse. So when I hit "R", Gmail quotes only my last selection.
Discard, unselect, hit R again.

------
smalter
A great Gmail feature that a lot of people don't use is "Send & Archive". It's
very useful for keeping a clean inbox.

------
cloudkj
I just realized that this feature also exists in Outlook, which explains why
many of my replies have strange quotes. I often highlight a user id or URL to
copy for further investigation, then hit reply only to be confused by the
condensed quote in the reply window. Now it makes sense :)

------
paulirish
The greatest Google Mail feature you're not using is definitely Forward All.
Forward an entire thread of emails, in chronological order, somewhere.

~~~
RossM
Is this a lab? The only option I have available is "Forward".

~~~
paulirish
It's in the More dropdown.

------
tete
Most mail clients seem to do this (maybe not so many web-based ones). Gmail
has the problem of creating Tofu:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Top-posting>

~~~
untog
Does anyone care about top posting any more? I feel like I haven't heard the
term since my newsgroup days.

~~~
w1ntermute
I bottom-post all the time when emailing certain (tech-savvy) individuals.
Makes it much easier to reply point-by-point.

However, bottom-posting's value is lost on the vast majority of people, so I
don't bother unless it's someone I know will appreciate it.

~~~
leephillips
I can't be sure, but I suspect that what you are calling top-posting is the
opposite. Top-posting refers to the sloppy practice of just pasting your reply
("posting") on "top" of the entire quoted email, rather than quoting
selectively and replying point-by-point, as you're supposed to do.

~~~
w1ntermute
Woops, my bad. I meant to write "bottom-posting".

------
shill
Wow, it's a slow news day on HN today.

Here is the email feature I want. If I paste a URL that looks like a
post/article into a new message, I want the slug automagically split, title
cased and copied into the subject line.

For example:

    
    
        http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/the-greatest-google-mail-feature-you.html
    

Would generate this subject:

    
    
        The Greatest Google Mail Feature You
    

Yes, this was a bad example because the title has been truncated, but I can
fill in the rest manually. Most slugs contain the full title.

~~~
kalleboo
Or they could just do what Facebook does and load the page server-side and get
the real title.

~~~
shill
Yeah, that would be the ideal strategy for pages with an og:title tag.

------
hardik988
I love this feature, and have been using it for a while.

Off topic, but a similar feature exists in Pinboard (<https://pinboard.in>).
You can select some text on the page before clicking bookmark, and that gets
set as the description of the page in the bookmark. It's a pretty handy
feature if the page title is not enough to describe what the page is about.

------
scott_meade
To turn this off in Mail.app: Preferences | Composing | Responding | "When
quoting text in replies"... "Include all the original message text"

------
Brajeshwar
So does Apple Mail. So, when I used that feature in Gmail, I wasn't really
surprised and actually expected it to be there.

Similarly, BufferApp post with the selected text instead of the title.

This is indeed a good UX feature and people should use this where it make
sense - select text and put it in context with the next action.

------
ralph
I'd like Gmail to do better as an email client confirming to standards. If
someone sends me an email with the Resent-{From,To,...} headers then I want
them shown to me. How can I forward an email as a message/rfc822 MIME content-
type rather than a poor rough text approximation in the main body?

------
jedbrown
I've been using this feature for ages, but it got _much_ worse about six
months ago when the last message in a thread became automatically "focused".
Now when I scroll up in a thread and select some text, the message I'm
selecting text from doesn't automatically get focus. I have to click one extra
time to get focus on the message I'm selecting. Even after half a year, I
still forget the extra click in about 20 emails per day, making the reply go
to the last message in the thread, with the entire thing quoted. To recover, I
have to discard my new message, scroll back to the thing I wanted to reply to,
and repeat the process. I filed a bug report in the first week, but no
response and the bug remains.

------
hakaaak
I've accidentally used this feature a number of times, and it drives me nuts.

The greatest feature about Gmail that not enough use is 2-factor auth (even
though it is not limited to Gmail- other web-based mail services provide it);
it is a pain in the arse, but after you get hacked once or twice, you'll be
happy you did it. Popular Saas apps are prime targets for being hacked. It may
mean they are safer, but they are also riskier to use. If you're not using
2-factor auth, you should probably not use Gmail, unless a hacker taking
control of your account wouldn't bother you or your contacts.

------
koopajah
I thought most of the email clients did that already and I just checked a few
which in fact don't! I'm pretty sure thunderbird does this if you want the
same feature on an external application.

------
nachteilig
Mail.app does this too, except that I keep using it accidentally.

------
Tomis02
That's all nice and dandy, but check this out. For a few months now I've been
noticing that emails from my inbox were being moved after a few days into
spam, without any kind of warning. This happens once every two weeks, more or
less.

We're not talking about false positives, these are emails that stay in my
inbox for days before being moved to the spam folder. Which basically means I
need to check my spam folder every day. Trust forever lost.

~~~
raldi
Do you have keyboard shortcuts enabled?

~~~
Tomis02
No. What does that have to do with anything?

~~~
raldi
If you typed a stray ! in a GMail window, it would mark a conversation as
spam.

~~~
Tomis02
It's not the case. This is much more serious.

------
MehdiEG
Like many, it's probably one of the first "feature" I bumped into with Gmail
and that still annoys the hell out of me years later.

------
biturd
I'm pretty sure this feature is not on by default. You must turn it on in labs
and then it is enabled. It's odd if that's the case because everyone posting
here knows of it as if it were just part of the experience.

But I'm looking at the on/off radio button in labs in another tab right now.

------
tammer
Great! Except lately I've come to despise ui elements that can only be
discovered by accident. An easily usable and effective feature that I only
find via a blog post is a feature that could use some visual feedback.

~~~
Gustomaximus
This is an unfair comment. Think about all the features gmail has that aren't
buttons in the UI. Would you really like 1) Buttons for all of these 2) some
pop-up or otherwise annoying message coming up for each of these features when
your trying to write/read an email?

~~~
tammer
I think that's the challenge of good UI - being visually informative without
overloading the user.

Subtlety is a difficult thing to achieve in any field. Silence, however, is
anything but subtle.

------
atldev
This makes a good combo with my other favorite Gmail trick: followup.cc

------
alexlimoges
I personally don't like that feature, for I often select a portion of the
email (eg a name or an address to google it) and then when I hit reply I
notice only the highlighted text remains!

------
aidenn0
And I was about to say "Of course I'm not using this since I don't use gmail"
but I use claws, which does this. Personally I would chuck any mouse-using
client that doesn't do this.

------
sh_vipin
That is a cool feature and was new to me. I liked it.

But you cann't reply to two different selections together. Probably because
none of the browsers allow controlled selection using CTRL key.

------
dewiz
I often "hit" this feature by mistake because I "mark" the text I am reading.
Personally I find it annoying and if I could I would disable it... any help
apreciated.

------
nvr219
I tried using this feature in Apple Mail for a few weeks before turning it off
because it was super annoying (I found it annoying for the same reasons
mibbitier did).

~~~
nickmccann
Thank you for pointing out that you were able to turn this off!

------
jkaljundi
Same in Thunderbird

------
carbocation
jgrahamc - Offtopic, but usethesource.com is down.[1][2] Since it's still
being linked from your blog, I assume this is unintentional and possibly went
unnoticed.

[1] <http://www.usethesource.com>

[2] <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.usethesource.com>

~~~
jgrahamc
Thanks for the reminder.

------
dutchbrit
I hate this feature - I always select something when reading, hit reply and
then find out it quoted something I randomly selected..

------
codeodor
Is this "feature" new?

All of the sudden recently I noticed a lot of single word quoted replies
happening to me, and I figured it was a bug.

------
rjv
Does anyone know of a way to select multiple passages to be quoted
automatically? A control+click/drag if you will?

------
chubbard
Normally titles like this are just insipid articles of link bait, but I agree
this is a handy feature. Thanks!

------
Grape
I just noticed this feature today, I kept wondering why I was replying to
sections of emails!

------
anigbrowl
I fail to see what's so difficult about simply deleting the irrelevant text in
a long email.

------
conradfr
Is there a way in GMail (and Reader) to set a unread item as read ? It drives
me crazy ...

~~~
phaemon
Yes, just select the emails you want and then click More...Mark as read

~~~
conradfr
Yep I forgot to say "in one click" :)

------
zeedotme
the issue i have with this is that it deletes all previous messages from the
email thread. So if someone wants to read back through previous messages or
forward the email onto someone who does - no es posible.

~~~
ditojim
conversely, this is one of the main reasons i use this feature.

~~~
zeedotme
why would you want to delete a thread history?

------
tiglionabbit
Not all that useful if I want to respond to more than one quote, is it?

------
julesie
This feature is also available in the Sparrow desktop client.

------
hayksaakian
i don't think i'll be using it in the future

most of my email flows like a conversation, i don't need to bring back older
parts if my recipient already has them in front of him.

------
username3
What if I want to highlight and quote separate paragraphs?

------
jgervin
Use this all the time. Apple mail has the same feature.

------
upinsmoke
The Mail app on OS X has this for some time now.

------
alxndr
Don't lots of other email clients do this too?

------
skiplecariboo
any mail client does that imo.. Mail.app too

------
jdjiaikej
AOL had this feature in the mid-90s

------
hippich
_If you select an area of a message and then hit Reply only the selected text
will be quoted in the response._

------
3825
I have been using it since...

------
mdonahoe
My favorite feature is Mute.

------
shocks
Another useful feature you may not be using is the Priority Inbox.

No, wait. I'm lying. It's crap.

------
shellehs
yes, the greatest feature, that ever email clients.

------
kahawe
While we are talking about greatest features and GMail... it would be awfully
nice if they would finally implement some sort of sub-string search, given
it's almost 2013 and they are synonymous with searching and finding things on
the internet.

It is incredibly frustrating that in order to be able to find an email I
received years ago I have to figure out exactly how someone might have written
a certain term in that mail. And I cannot see any excuse for not offering that
feature; limit me to a few substring searches a day if resources are an issue
and I don't expect fully-indexed lightning-fast results, a simple "grep", so
to speak, would be just fine...but please let me search my mails properly!

~~~
GFischer
Yes please :) . If a third party implements this, I might use it as well :) (I
don't care how - POP3 offloading to my PC?).

Well, I'll add it to my "startup ideas" list :) .

~~~
dmortin
See this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844064>

~~~
GFischer
Nice, didn't know about that feature of Opera.

------
rogerchucker
Best Gmail feature is "Undo Send" - period. It has saved me embarrassment
countless number of times.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
No contest for "Undo send"; but lets be honest; in almost all applications
undoing is the most used feature.

~~~
rogerchucker
Yeah but undoing sending something to someone as opposed to editing a text
file feels like pure magic, not to mention the fact that the undo link is
right up there in front of you after you have clicked Send.

------
lhnn
So many people in this thread are saying they highlight sections of text as
they read. I don't do that, and no-one I know does that.

What is the benefit? Is it intentional, or is it a habit with no real use?

~~~
happimess
I do it in more or less the same way that I idly thumb the corner of a book
I'm reading, or repeatedly open and close a pen while I'm reading code.

It's just something tactile to do while my attention is otherwise occupied.

------
donniezazen
Wow!! This is fantastic.

