GMail: Clickable, Colored Tags (Good But Not Good Enough)
Rumor has just recently hit the blogosphere that Google’s GMail was to introduce clickable and colored tags for emails. Today apparently my account was added to the test group (or was it generally released? I don’t know).
I think I like the feature, since it has also become a one-click operation now to remove a tag from a mail; a feature that comes in very handy when you accidentally mis-tag a mail and want to fix it quickly:
That being said, now Google only has to come up with a faster way to actually assign tags to emails. For me, neither the dropdown list in the single mail view nor checking a bunch of mails and then using the dropdown list in the mail list view are particularly appealing ways of categorizing emails. While it is not too tedious or unbearable, there may be quicker ways to achieve this. One idea would be suggesting a handful of existing tags in the mail view (addable with one click), judging by the similarity of the current mail to the ones that you have previously tagged with a particular tag. This would have the charm of being both fast for the user and also suggesting classification of emails into categories, even from people who have never sent you a mail before and before you have even thought about making a filter rule to auto-tag similar emails. (And I just made this up off the top of my head, so please feel free to yell at me in the comments if you dislike my suggestion).
By the way, the CSS for the tags seems to render them too low (see the screenshot), with the Firefox 3 nightlies. I wonder if this is a Firefox rendering issue or a bug in the CSS Google uses.
The thing that bugs me is that the “labels” view on the left still uses a uniform green for all the labels and only puts the assigned color in a little box off to the right of the label. What’s the point in assigning colors at all if they’re all green in the primary view?
That’s such a blatant bug that I’m sincerely hopeful it’ll get fixed shortly though.
I like the sound of that – a mix of Bayesian filtering and manual training.
I also think the label box needs to be able to run in two modes, kind of like how the subscriptions box works in google reader – ‘all labels’ and ‘unread labels’ modes
plus – they need to let the user customize the width of the label box – mine always get truncated
I actually found this very useful this morning when i first saw it…. but now all of a sudden.. they’ve gone!??
My main complaint is that in the list view of messages, the new tags are rather jarring and ugly – you’ve got a nice blue or white background, with black text, then blam! a green box with green text. And a couple of my longest tags are now cut off when they have unread messages.
The suggested tags is a good idea, I guess. But I have rules set up for the vast majority of my mail, and I only manually add a tag a few times a week.
Using a greasemonkey script you can add the ability to tag things by pressing t and then typing the tag, it will auto complete once you have typed enough for the tag to be unique. Also you can jump to a tag’s view by typing g+tag.
The script is available here: http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey/
I have a new version that adds a help screen will all available shortcut keys when you press h as well (ported from the older version of the script) but the maintainer never responded to my patch so if you want that feature let me know.
“One idea would be suggesting a handful of existing tags in the mail view (addable with one click), judging by the similarity of the current mail to the ones that you have previously tagged with a particular tag.”
I don’t agree with this. I don’t want to get b*ed by Gmail everytime I check my emails.
@anonymous, I don’t seem to get your point. Do you mean you don’t like any features (but the plain displaying of mail) at all? In that case, you should probably use a different service.
@marineam, sure, will you mail me that script? I would like to give it a shot
Fred: Gmail supports pressing the ? key to get a help dialog. It doesn’t list the features added by the Gmail Macros Greasemonkey script though.
http://blog.persistent.info/2007/11/macros-for-new-version-of-gmail.html
Thanks for the useful comments so far. The GMail Macros Greasemonkey script comes in very handy, I begin to like it!
There’s already the list of labels shown on the left-hand side – all it needs to do is support drag & drop onto the current message, drag & drop onto a specific item in the message list. And for good measure, I suppose drag & drop of a message onto an item in the label list. No need for any extra buttons cluttering the UI.
I like the drag and drop idea. But unfortunately that won’t give you suggestions on which tags to apply. But as a means to allow easy tagging, that’s certainly a good idea.
If I had to guess, I’d say a Firefox 3 rendering issue. Seems like there’s tons of them, there’s a fair number of widgets in my company’s AJAX framework that don’t render properly in Firefox 3.
~Grauw
@ Putting IA guessing tags in the emails is a very bad idea.