Utills Thoughts and Ideas

Friday, December 02, 2005

Improvements to GMail I would like to see


With the competition concentrating on keeping up with Google its obvious that we are going to see Google try to explore new things with its Gmail service. These are some of the improvements I would like to see: -
  • Enable tabs for email -> Having more than one page to read email has always been something that people do especially with browsers like Firefox.
  • Allow RSS feeds for specific labels -> So if I have a label called "Uni", which I do for all forwards from my university inbox, I would like to subscribe to that label via the Live Bookmark system on Firefox. At least it would be a better way of knowing when I receive an email from a specific person or about a specific topic.
  • Add calendar or to-do list within Gmail -> I think that Gmail should allow a tight integration between email and some sort of calendar or to-do list. Some sort of right click option when you click on a date or highlight a piece of text within an email to allow for adding reminders for yourself.
  • Change right click to a context menu -> This links in with opening the link in a new tab, trashing a specific email. The menu should reflect exactly what is possible so if I right click on a message it should allow me to open the message in a new tab, in a new window, delete message, archive, apply a specific label, download its attachment(s), etc.
  • Allow drag and drop into a specific label/folder -> All the selected emails should be able to be dragged into a label. I'm not actually sure how much extra value this would have but as with all good interfaces there should be more than one method to do something.
  • Allow direct download of attachments -> First they need to remove the new window that keeps opening when you try to download an attachment. Thereafter from the page that displays all the messages they should enable the paperclip to allow access to direct download of the attachment.
  • Show a progress bar with size info when adding an attachment -> The current method (attaches in the background) of attaching the files to a new message is a big improvement on most systems. Even better would be to show the size of the file that is being attached and how much is done.
  • One-click preview -> Like one of the greasemonkey scripts written by a Google Employee there should be the ability to see a greater portion of the message just by right clicking on it.
  • Mailing List support -> currently there is a hack that I use to achieve Mailing Lists in Gmail. Native support for this would be very cool indeed.
These are the UI features I would like to see. In terms of raw features I would love support for IMAP, Google Calendar/To-Do List, and lots of other stuff that I wont go into detail for now. There is a lot of cool stuff going on in the background at Google, I just wish they could concentrate on some of their current services rather than trying to put their fingers in too many pies.

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