Gmail Still Sucks

I continue to hate Gmail, and the reasons continue to grow. To recap and expand upon my previously aired gripes:

The main thing that drives me positively batty is all the clicking and page-loading. Every time I want to read a message, I have to click and wait for it to load. (I know, it's just a second or two, but they add up.) Then after I reply, I have to click and wait for it to send—and unlike in Apple Mail or any other non-web-based email client, I can't move on to another message until it does. Then I have to click and wait to get back to the inbox. That's a big pet peeve for me, by the way: Why on earth doesn't it send you right back to the inbox (or wherever you last were, or wherever you designate as your preferred default location) after you've sent a message? Who would want to stay there with their already-sent message?

I still can't get used to the threaded conversations. One thing that makes me nuts is that I can't tell at a glance whether I've responded to a message yet. Certainly, if there isn't a "2" there, I know that I haven't replied, but once a conversation gets to 3 or 5 or 8 back-and-forths—particularly with more than two participants—I have to open the damn thing just to tell whether it's my turn or not. More clicking! With regular old mailboxes, on the other hand, you can see the little "replied-to" icon next to messages in your in-box. I usually just delete the ones I've already replied to anyhow. And sometimes the threads get garbled, particularly when lots of people are involved. It isn't always easy to tell who's replying to what.

You can't easily do two things at once. I might be replying to a message and want to refer to a completely different message, but it's not possible—you can only be inside one mailbox (or whatever the eff they're called) at once. Grrrr!

The labels? More clicking and waiting. Plus, I don't want to have to label everything—and not everything is easily categorized anyhow.

I continue to really miss the "Send Again" feature I use in Mail. I frequently want to re-send an already-sent message to someone else, or to the same person with an additional line or two at the top, or whatever. In Gmail I have to copy and paste into a new message. Tedious!

There's no easy way to send multiple attachments—you have to keep clicking "Attach a file" and then click on each file individually; in Mail, you click once and then highlight all the files at once.

Receiving attachments is also a pain in the butt. I just want to click on an attachment and have it open up in the appropriate application—whether it's a Word document, a photo, a PDF, or whatever. With Gmail, I have to either choose to download it, or view it as a Google document (which doesn't seem to have any advantages whatsoever), or view it in HTML; in any event, it all just amounts to more clicking and waiting! And when someone attaches photos, they sometimes show up and sometimes not; when they do, they're tiny, and when I click to view them, they're enormous.

Finally, I would say I get a maximum of 5 spam messages a week on my Comcast account—and my Comcast address is the only one I ever use on the Web, for forms, blog comments, surveys, contests, mail-order, you name it. But my personal address, which points to Gmail? Hundreds upon hundreds of spam messages, and all the worst kind. I would never in a bazillion years let one of my kids have a Gmail account for just that reason. And, to top it off, recently there was a period of a week or two where Gmail was randomly putting legitimate messages from people on my contacts list into the spam folder—so now every few days I have to spend time wading through all that junk just in case I come across some real messages from my friends that somehow got trashed.

I'm sure I will have more complaints about Gmail next time; it seems as though something new about it pisses me off almost every day. But I'm stuck with it for the time being.

Comments

[James]

I have a gmail account, but I rarely ever read my mail there. I use an offline mail client to collect my mail from gmail, and I read it offline. Mainly because I, like you, don't like the delay.

There are rumors that a big Google gmail change is in the works. One of the rumors is that they will make it work by downloading your mail for you in the background. That would solve the delay problem, but I expect your other complaints will remain unless they do a really big redesign.

[Kirsty]

I've said before, I really love gmail - and I think y opinions are the opposite of yours in almost every way:
- I don't notice the loading at all.
- I press 'archive' after I've replied to a message, which then takes me back to the inbox. Doing it that way makes it easy to see which messages I've replied to. Either that or I 'star' the ones I need to think about for a bit before I reply.
- When I need to refer to an old email while composing a new one, I press 'save now' - saves it as a draft, I look up the old message using search (don't use the labels, they're pointless with such a good search) then go back to my new message via 'drafts'.
- I never get any spam in my gmail inbox, it goes straight to the spam folder. Unlike my other 'anti-spam' type account.
- I really love the way it handles attachments - much easier.

Some things are just like that though; the TypePad configuration settings still drive me insane each time I have to use them.

[Karen]

Having to save and close the message I'm working on when I need to refer to another message elsewhere makes me crazy! I should be able to have two (or more) messages open at once. Oh, and another thing: When I'm replying to a message, I can't see all of the original message while I'm typing, so I have to keep stopping to scroll up or down. Maddening.

My spam goes all to my spam folder too, but I still have to dig through it ever since I found it trashing some of my "real" messages. ARGH!

[Florinda]

I actually really like the threaded conversations - the lack of them annoys me when using Outlook at work. And as James said, you can have Gmail download into an offline mail client (my husband does that, and his is Apple Mail too). I'm with Kirsty on some of the other points, and I really prefer a web-based e-mail. But you know, the world would be a boring place if everyone liked all the same things in the same way! :-)

[karen]

i hate gmail,,,it sucks.
why?
ok,,when u get an email and you want to keep it ,right?,,,so you move it to one of the labels(folders) that u created your self, but it dont move the email that u want to save to that label(folder) it copies it to there,,,it get more stupid then just that,,,so you go to delete the copy thats in your in box,,,guess what happened,,,it also deleted the copy of that very email right from my label(folder).

so i email gmail telling them this ,,, they told me to email support,,i tried that ,,same responce,,,,so i just closed my gmail.com account ,,,,it was just for junk any way and nothing at all important goes there.

the END

[Karen]

The thing about Gmail is that the labels don't behave like folders do in other programs -- they really are just labels. So if you delete a message in one "place," it's deleted everywhere. It's hard to get used to!

[karen]

thats why gmail sucks, how can you save something when it gets deleted from every where ?. whats the point of having a gmail account when you cant keep what you want and get rid of what you dont want,,,,oh wait a minute you can delete stuff,,,silly me !, one just cant keep stuff,,the only way to keep something i guess is to never delete nothing,,,,how stupid,,,,but thats ok ,,,,no biggie now , i'm with yahoo and hotmail, they work just fine, and there messengers are cool too.

[karen]

oh by the way ,,,i like this page, nice and tidy, thank you for letting me vent about gmail. i wont complain about it no more ,,unless you want me too,,lol.

[sam]

I don't see how threading messages is more convenient than sorting them by time and date. Logically, I would want the most recent email on top?

And thank you gmail for having a bunch of features for us to suggest and never see. Oh, I really did enjoy the joke you made about gmail doing my laundry.