Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

About 4 months ago I asked Google to provide an option in Gmail to intelligently reply from the address to which the e-mail was addressed (awfully useful if you have multiple accounts and use gmail as aggregator). And what do you know, they recently did it.

Encouraged by this 100% hit ratio, I have another request to fix a Gmail annoyance I have.

In short the idea could be described as: a way to easily see only unread messages.

Imagine that you get a lot of e-mail. Imagine you use filters to automatically label messages. That gives you a way to easily partition messages by view (i.e. a label is a filter). Now imagine that you process different e-mails differently. For example an e-mail from a mailing list will be quickly scanned and forgotten but an e-mail with support request you leave as unread until the moment you have time to respond to it.

There’s a hole in this scenario: as far as I can tell, in Gmail there is no way to see just your unread messages. The whole system breaks down because when you do have to time to respond to e-mails that require more attention than usual, you have to fish out unread messages one by one in a long, Inbox view.

For that reason alone I stopped using filters and labels and adapted myself to Gmail by processing e-mails linearly.

Technically, what I want could be done in at least 2 ways:

• an option in preferences “Show unread messages in Inbox first”. With this option, unread messages in “Inbox” view would always show up at the top, so that I don’t have to chase them down in a sea of read messages
• a fixed “Unread” label/view, which would work like Inbox except only show unread messages. Or at least a way for me to create such filter myself

I guess I can’t be too hard on Google - they’re in Beta after all.

Update: I just received a tip that entering “is:unread” in search box will show unread messages. I discovered, that entering “label:unread” does the same thing. There’s even greasmonkey extention that adds persistent search to gmail (strangely enough by a googler that doesn’t work on gmail). Still, those are rather gross hacks. I need those things right there, in gmail.

Also, I discovered a slight inconsitency (i.e. a bug) in gmail. It doesn’t show any messages as unread in main view, but when I do explicit search for unread, I get a bunch of them.

A statement that resonated with me today:

I think there’s incredible room for innovation in the mobile data market, both smartphones and other sorts of devices. But I’m not sure who’s going to deliver it. The best mobile devices combine hardware, software, and online services (RIM Blackberry being a great example). Most companies don’t know how to build that sort of integrated solution. That’s why you see so many devices loaded with features that please technophiles, but don’t sell in volume to normal users. The situation is so bad that some of the operators and handset companies have started to write off mobile data in general.

From an interview with Michael Mace. The guy also has a weblog.