When you look at the bottom of your GMail window, you’ll notice links in the footer, cycling through more or less helpful tips as well as Google advertisements.

For years now, one of these links has been to the GMail Notifier for Mac:

Sadly though, this link to http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/index.html (forwards to http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper) has, also for a long, long time now, been a not found error. As you can’t open a bug report with Google, I’ve emailed the GMail service people about this before, but I guess dead links in production software are not on top of their todo list.

Ah well, maybe they google for “Gmail fail” sometimes and find the bug report this way

Just recently I ranted about how bad it is that GMail auto-adds every possible email address it can get its hands on to your contacts, making them utterly cluttered with the most random people on the planet, including “remove me from this mailinglist” addresses and others you never want to see again.

It seems as if Google heard me (and many others): They now introduced a new section “suggested contacts” that they dump everybody and their brother’s email address into, but the people you actually want to have as contacts stay in an also newly created “My Contacts” folder.

This gives you the convenience of still adding people you email to the auto-complete feature (which, in and by itself is not so bad), while not hopelessly cluttering your contacts. Exactly what I want!

Well, thank you, Google. Read more about it on the GMail blog.

Dear GMail,

I would like you to know that it really really sucks how you add everybody to my address book who I only sent one mail to, ever. That clogs the address book and depending on what kind of message it was, after just about 30 seconds I neither care nor remember what I wrote them an email about once in my lifetime.

Imagine me writing an email to some company’s customer service. I get an answer from a representative asking me to provide some more information. I reply and attach the needed infos. You helpfully add this person to my address book so I can remember every customer service representative that I ever had to deal with, just in case I ever need to email them personally again. Thank you so much!

Let alone all these random people on craigslist who use a gmail address who you add to my instant messenger automatically, so they can start chatting with me or at the very least see me being online for the next 25 years.

A one-click option to add somebody to your address book is a great idea. Automatically adding everybody to my address bucket (that mess is not a book anymore) however is a bad idea.

Just sayin’…

Oh thank heaven for the beauty of context-sensitive advertising.

As most people on the Mozilla project, I get quite a bit of bugmail from bugzilla. Needless to say, Google mail tries to adapt to this situation by delivering me the ads that they believe are the most appropriate for the mail I am currently looking at:

“Will you be reincarnated as a bug?”

Well, I hope not! What if they resolve me INVALID?