Ask HN: Features you'd like to see in Gmail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Features you'd like to see in Gmail?

9 pointsfjabre26 comments

Hi all,

I'm working on a mail client project related to Gmail and I'd love your input.

The question I'm asking is this:

Is there any feature you'd like to see in Gmail that is currently lacking or absent all together? The question probably applies to email clients in general as well.

Thanks

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I want to be able to write an e-mail and then schedule it to be sent at a later time of my choosing (e.g. 9am the next day, if I don't want to admit I'm up in the middle of the night).

Yeah I thought about this a lot as well.. I wonder how much demand there is for something like this? I've definitely had a use for it myself on occasion.

When I last looked on the forums, there was someone new asking for it several times a week. But Google seem determined not to implement this feature. I can see that it might be rather complex to implement.

+1. I put off hitting send on emails for this reason, and then forget to send until its too late.

1. A refresh button that does a POP fetch from other accounts. Currently I have to go to Settings > Accounts and then click fetch, and if I don't do this on an active email thread things get messy with replies to outdated messages.

2. A small one-click popup note feature. When I need to jot down something quick I write it as a new message and save it as a draft to come back to later. Or if I need to upload a document to access from a different computer I'll do that in an email draft as well. It would be nice to keep that kind of thing separate from actual email but close enough to be just as convenient.

A refresh button that does a POP fetch from other accounts.

You can get this feature by enabling "refresh POP accounts" in labs. Google rolled it out in March: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-in-labs-refresh-po...

Awesome, thanks!

I want to Bounce/Redirect (as in Thunderbird and Mail.app) a full email (including all original headers, attachments) to another email address. Without changing the From: header.

This would be useful for sharing an email on an intranet website, or Highrise. I would delete the email from gmail after I confirm that its available where my colleagues can get at it.

This is a lot better than forwarding to n colleagues and creating n potentially conflicting copies and versions of the document.

http://mailredirect.mozdev.org/

Great. We have a similar concept already in there for that. Good to know there is some demand for it.

Autorules.

If I sign up for a new service or website or whatever, I often get a slew of mail messages. I can easily label these or move them to a folder, but I frequently forget to create a rule to label them automatically.

So if I get 3 mails from a new source, highlight them all and label them as (something), I wish gmail would ask me if I want to treat all mail from xxx that way in future.

Doesn;t this already kinda exist in the "Filter Messages Like This" option?

but I frequently forget to create a rule to label them automatically.

Delay actually sending a email by a few minutes so you have a chance to go back and edit it or 'unsend' if you need to. (And have a method to force it to send immediately if you're sure you won't want to edit it).

Already exists, look in your 'labs' tab on the settings page.

Ya i have that enabled, but it only works for a few seconds. Also if I click another link after clicking send (which I usually do, I usually go to inbox) I lose the chance to edit it. I think it would be useful to have the ability to edit the email for a few minutes after you send most times I don't realize immediately there is a change I want to make, but I usually do realize it within 2 minutes.

Fair enough! I've just gotten used to seeing the Undo link in gmail...but I've never actually had to use it.

I believe it's a 5 or 10 second delay for that labs feature. Something more similar to commenting on HN might be interesting. Allowing someone to edit/delete for up to several minutes before the email is officially sent..

You can now increase it up to 20 seconds from the "General" tab in Settings. As of now, the only choices are 5, 10, and 20 seconds.

Great idea and easy to implement too. Thanks.

The ability to apply a label or a star to a particular EMAIL, not the entire thread.

Use cases: - You send out an email to a large-ish group asking for their opinion, and want to categorize the responses. - You have a long thread discussing social plans, and partway through the thread, somebody includes the address, and you want to star that message

I have a similar use case, but a different solution: The ability to create a followup link to a particular message (optionally: an entire conversation, or label).

I'd want to push a button on a message (or on the thread) labelled "follow up" and get a new message that I can edit, that contains a link in it to wherever I was. This is an operation like reply or forward, except it's always to me (and additionally, perhaps, Cc'd to someone else)

Followup messages go into a special "Follow Up" folder. The annotation can be edited and amended as needed. If I Cc it to someone else, I'd like it if they could edit that followup annotation with me, perhaps using Google Docs,

Ideally, I would be able to enter a date/time for a reminder and have that added to by Google calendar.

Ironically, better search. Gmail search is nowhere near as intelligent (or as permissive of "fuzzier" queries) as Google itself.

Make it Open Source. Why should I use a GMail clone that is just like gmail, but doesn't have as large a company backing it? Make it open source, and I'll install and use it on my system. That is what can differentiate you from Gmail.

Advanced filtering - you can fake it now by putting something like joe) AND (subject:cars OR subject:boats in the filter box, but I'd like a more user-friendly way to do it.

PGP support in Gmail would be great.

lynx/w3m/etc. support. I'm told it used to work, but when faced with a situation where I needed to check my mail and only had a terminal, I couldn't get it to. Which is a shame, I had to run across the block to a library.

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