I have never understood gmails features. They consitantly do not work for me, maybe the way i use email is too old school or something.
Threads are consistently broken, the messages are in the wrong order and are almost never grouped logically with seemingly random emails getting placed in same thread.
The new tab system seems to only be right about 30% of the time, I constantly have extreamly important emails going to the promotions and updates tab even after I have seemingly said all further emails of this type should go to primary.
I'm genuinely curious do these features work well for others? Am I alone in finding that these things just don't work?
Works near-perfect for me. The tabs work, the threads work. Happy gmailer right here! :)
I do everything from gmail, it's pretty much my life. I receive about 50 mails a day. I have important logs and reports from my servers come into gmail. I hardly ever have to re-organize.
Now, how do we find out the difference between how you and I use gmail?
The biggest productivity boosters are filters and labels, once you have them setup. This works if you are working on recurring themes (long running projects, recurring tasks such as billing, etc). I imagine everyone has keyboard shortcuts enabled.
If you like using labels, you should probably be using sub-labels also.
Another trick that is indispensable to me is creating a contact for "note to self" with [email protected]. Then you can filter such mails and apply a yellow label. With this setup you can send yourself notes whenever you want. You can also add private notes to existing threads which I find very helpful.
I may be wrong but I think emails in tabs are classified based on the email address so it may not work when the email address changes. It should work if you continue training but I am speaking only from personal experience.
The only issue I personally ever had was gmail tagging almost anything as spam after I initially imported all my old email. It would even tag mails from my contacts as spam, but this stopped after a week or so. I've never encountered anything like what you describe.
For someone who runs into this issue quite often; this is a great add-on. You'd be surprised how many issues and embarrassing emails have arisen due to Gmail incorrectly threading emails. Great job Streak :)
p.s.
Is it just me, but I can't fathom why the Gmail team doesn't scoop these guys up ASAP :)
Yes, it's so obvious it's hard to see why Google hasn't implemented it already. I wonder what will happen with this project, unlikely that Google would acquire something rather than assign a small team to fix this within a week?
Bravo. Ignore the haters who haven't run into thread issues and thus believe no one else can possibly run into these issues. "Just change the subject!" Clearly these people have never sent a bulk email, or considered the fact that others may use email differently from them. Really tired of this mentality of "I don't have complete information but I think I'm great thus I'm just going to assume you are clueless".
> "I don't have complete information but I think I'm great thus I'm just going to assume you are clueless".
That's a straw man if I ever saw one. No one here claims to be great. And no one is calling this product clueless. In fact all the discourse thus far is fairly civil other than this comment which comes off as hostile.
There will always be doubters, that doesn't make them haters. Why would they hate anyway? Shunning them as clueless and ignorant won't convert them--they'll only dislike you more for labelling them as such.
On topic, changing the subject is a means to accomplishing thread splitting and people do it for that reason. It may not work for everyone but it does indeed work and works reasonably well. There is nothing self-aggrandising about that.
Apparently I am one of those haters. I guess "Is this really a thing people have trouble with?" is not a valid question, but I really don't understand when/where/why this thread-splitter feature would be useful, let alone useful enough to enough people to warrant extended time on the HN front page.
Can somebody (who won't presuppose my motivation or my opinion) answer my question?
Ever notice Gmail sometimes gmail threads things it shouldn't? (i.e. when you bcc a lot of people). We built a way for you to break of a subset of the messages into their own thread.
I don't see anything in your privacy policy about email handling, but maybe I'm just skimming too fast.
When I click on install on the extension, it says that it requires access to *.mailfoogae.appspot.com; do you route my mail through your app in order to add this feature to gmail, or is it done completely locally within the sandbox of my account/browser?
In order to make this particular feature work, we hit the Gmail API with your Oauth credentials (which you can revoke at anytime). The actual process of splitting up the thread requires us to download some of your inbox content, modify it, then upload it. We do not store a copy of your mail ever.
I have very rarely run into misbehaved threading. Even so, for me personally it's not enough to warrant the effort of doing a manual split. Threads are ephemeral and it's fairly trivial to change the subject and fork the thread.
However, I would really love to see thread merging or some kind of grouping into a master thread which can track all the sub-threads. I am fairly certain this would have very high utility for a lot of other people here especially if its dead simple to do (group > search thread > select thread > ok). I could easily use this to merge a bug report email thread with the internal bug tracking thread, etc. Or a candidate's job application with his interview feedback, etc.
I haven't tried it yet, but oh my I've been waiting ages for you guys to add this feature! I'm sure it wasn't easy.
For context, the merging of emails threads in Gmail would at times make Streak unusable. This should be a big boost to Streak usability!
I also notice you guys added a "reminder" feature - effectively putting you head-on with Boomerang (which I currently pay for).
I have Streak, YesWare and Boomerang installed in my Gmail. It's too many add-ons for my liking. Boomerang, although the only one I currently pay for, seems to be the one that will have to go.
I'm personally waiting for a tool to group and split mails in a mailing-group-compatibile tree view. Or at least something respecting the usual headers mailing groups use to mark which mails belong to which thread (so that when you change the topic the e-mail doesn't go to a different thread in GMail).
Not that I care about it for 99% of my conversations, but one Hackerspace I subscribe to seems to be stuck in 1980s Unix Land, and get terribly annoyed at people using GMail for mailing ;).
[+] [-] math0ne|11 years ago|reply
Threads are consistently broken, the messages are in the wrong order and are almost never grouped logically with seemingly random emails getting placed in same thread.
The new tab system seems to only be right about 30% of the time, I constantly have extreamly important emails going to the promotions and updates tab even after I have seemingly said all further emails of this type should go to primary.
I'm genuinely curious do these features work well for others? Am I alone in finding that these things just don't work?
[+] [-] neals|11 years ago|reply
I do everything from gmail, it's pretty much my life. I receive about 50 mails a day. I have important logs and reports from my servers come into gmail. I hardly ever have to re-organize.
Now, how do we find out the difference between how you and I use gmail?
[+] [-] aleem|11 years ago|reply
If you like using labels, you should probably be using sub-labels also.
Another trick that is indispensable to me is creating a contact for "note to self" with [email protected]. Then you can filter such mails and apply a yellow label. With this setup you can send yourself notes whenever you want. You can also add private notes to existing threads which I find very helpful.
I may be wrong but I think emails in tabs are classified based on the email address so it may not work when the email address changes. It should work if you continue training but I am speaking only from personal experience.
[+] [-] tokenizerrr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetSpiegel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramoq|11 years ago|reply
p.s. Is it just me, but I can't fathom why the Gmail team doesn't scoop these guys up ASAP :)
[+] [-] fjolthor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aleem|11 years ago|reply
That's a straw man if I ever saw one. No one here claims to be great. And no one is calling this product clueless. In fact all the discourse thus far is fairly civil other than this comment which comes off as hostile.
There will always be doubters, that doesn't make them haters. Why would they hate anyway? Shunning them as clueless and ignorant won't convert them--they'll only dislike you more for labelling them as such.
On topic, changing the subject is a means to accomplishing thread splitting and people do it for that reason. It may not work for everyone but it does indeed work and works reasonably well. There is nothing self-aggrandising about that.
[+] [-] gmisra|11 years ago|reply
Can somebody (who won't presuppose my motivation or my opinion) answer my question?
[+] [-] latifnanji27|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alooPotato|11 years ago|reply
Ever notice Gmail sometimes gmail threads things it shouldn't? (i.e. when you bcc a lot of people). We built a way for you to break of a subset of the messages into their own thread.
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|11 years ago|reply
(Thread Splitter's a much better name :)
[+] [-] flavor8|11 years ago|reply
When I click on install on the extension, it says that it requires access to *.mailfoogae.appspot.com; do you route my mail through your app in order to add this feature to gmail, or is it done completely locally within the sandbox of my account/browser?
[+] [-] alooPotato|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aleem|11 years ago|reply
However, I would really love to see thread merging or some kind of grouping into a master thread which can track all the sub-threads. I am fairly certain this would have very high utility for a lot of other people here especially if its dead simple to do (group > search thread > select thread > ok). I could easily use this to merge a bug report email thread with the internal bug tracking thread, etc. Or a candidate's job application with his interview feedback, etc.
[+] [-] alooPotato|11 years ago|reply
We have a blog post on how we use Streak for bug tracking internally: http://blog.streak.com/2013/07/how-streak-uses-streak-to-tra...
[+] [-] OmarIsmail|11 years ago|reply
For your examples specifically you mention candidate tracking or bug tracking. Those are both default pipeline templates in our system.
[+] [-] Major_Grooves|11 years ago|reply
For context, the merging of emails threads in Gmail would at times make Streak unusable. This should be a big boost to Streak usability!
I also notice you guys added a "reminder" feature - effectively putting you head-on with Boomerang (which I currently pay for).
I have Streak, YesWare and Boomerang installed in my Gmail. It's too many add-ons for my liking. Boomerang, although the only one I currently pay for, seems to be the one that will have to go.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
I'm personally waiting for a tool to group and split mails in a mailing-group-compatibile tree view. Or at least something respecting the usual headers mailing groups use to mark which mails belong to which thread (so that when you change the topic the e-mail doesn't go to a different thread in GMail).
Not that I care about it for 99% of my conversations, but one Hackerspace I subscribe to seems to be stuck in 1980s Unix Land, and get terribly annoyed at people using GMail for mailing ;).
[+] [-] asah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latifnanji27|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gmisra|11 years ago|reply