Gmail Retires 5 and Graduates 6 Labs Features
gmailblog.blogspot.com
gmailblog.blogspot.com
I'm pretty sure even Labs go through some sort of QA process.
However, even with fixed-width available, I almost always go after the "show original" feature* instead. I find that having the message isolated in a separate tab altogether makes it much easier to read.
* "Show original" is under the drop-down menu for the message itself.
Admittedly everyone laughs at the terminal theme. But it does the trick. And the green on black is surprisingly comfortable to read.
However, every now and then I'm reminded that in giving up some freedom, you pay a price. I would love to try and hack in a feature to Gmail that makes it permanently associate certain From email adddresses with people. For instance, if I write someone and set the From to @dedasys.com, I want future email with that person to always use that address. If I use the @apache.org address, then that should be used in the future, unless I change it. I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.
I understand your point, and I know you aren't arguing against Google, but... supposing you were able to... would you? I'd bet at least 999 out of 1,000 users of any given open client- Thunderbird for example- would not invest the effort, or could not due to lack of skill. And this is with Thunderbird- GMail's penetration into markets with unskilled non hacker types is drastically greater.
Ironically, I guess you could say my argument is that like the features they are phasing out- not enough people would truly use it!
If you really wanted to, there might be that kind of ability in gears. Perhaps low level, or perhaps just through manipulating the UI- a bit of a macro.
I implemented the "Oops, do you want to send an attachment" feature in mutt years ago, and sent in the patch, which, sadly, was not accepted.
Most people don't hack on stuff - no argument there. But some of us do, and I think that we occasionally make the world a better place.
No disagreement here. hackers have made my world a much better place many times.
Courier is even worse than the proportional standard. Why not respect the setting that was defined in the browser?
The 'gl' (go label) shortcut used to display an auto-complete text box in the center of your gmail window to enter a label, now 'gl' jumps to the search box and automatically prepends 'label:' to the query. It makes much more sense to do it in the search box, but doesn't feel as fluid as the old one.