
How Gmail happened: The inside story, as revealed by creator Paul Buchheit - tobiasrenger
https://www.techinasia.com/gmail-happened-story
======
abhchand
> Livingston: Which was your favorite feature?

>

> Buchheit: That’s hard to pin down. Actually one of the things that we added
> very early on, which at this point seems pretty obvious, but it turned out
> to be really nice, is the autocomplete when you type in the email addresses.
> Once you have it, it just seems so obvious. “Why wouldn’t you have
> autocomplete?”

This is amazing and speaks to how much for granted we take
features/discoveries/inventions after they become ingrained in our lines. I
can't imagine a world where i have to remember the email addresses, and he's
right it seems so simple of a feature. But I guarantee at the time people were
questioning whether it's worth the time to build it out.

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Tempest1981
Labels are fine, but I want a built-in "Quick Links" for one-click switching
between my favorite searches. "is:unread in:inbox" <=> in:inbox <=> etc

Edit: formerly in Labs, then killed. Still not a native feature?

[https://www.cdgi.com/2017/09/mikes-technical-tip-goodbye-
gma...](https://www.cdgi.com/2017/09/mikes-technical-tip-goodbye-gmails-quick-
links/)

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franga2000
Completely off-topic: I bookmarked this link to be cached for offline reading.
I was greeted by a blank page with gray blocks instead of text. Why would
anyone make a single-entry page load the content via AJAX? Whyy???

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ggm
I'm a happy user. But two things stand out to me as symptomatic of the "we
know better than you" aspects. The first is labels. Exposed in IMAP as if
Folders but not folders. Also you can't add more to the steerage bar subtypes
of inbox. Also all and spam and unread are magic. This works but gee.. special
case? What happened to architecture for generic cases and specialisation
afterward?

And then other? ! Keyboard shortcut marks to spam. Even if the current context
is the spam label. Why isn't it a toggle? Why can't I unmark spam with the
same effective shortcut which contextually makes sense. There is no unspam
shortcut, presumably because reasons. (There's a button and generic steerage
can get it keyboard only)

Tl;dr he did amazingly good but there are still some moments of whatthefuckery
and wheknowbetterthanyou

~~~
rahimnathwani
"The first is labels. Exposed in IMAP as if Folders but not folders."

Are you suggesting that:

A) Gmail shouldn't include a label feature?

B) Labels shouldn't be exposed via IMAP?

C) Something else?

I'm hoping it's C (as I like labels, like them being exposed via IMAP, and
don't know how else they could have exposed them such that the IMAP clients of
the day would have supported them).

~~~
ggm
I think maybe google should have gone into IMAP standards to explain labels
and make them more generally useful. Sieve?

~~~
rahimnathwani
In 2010, my primary phone was a Nokia E71. It supported both IMAP and Exchange
ActiveSync. IIRC, whichever way was used to access Gmail, labels were usable.

If the Gmail team had gone the way you suggest, I'm not sure that phone would
_ever_ have been able to access Gmail labels.

