>> - It doesn't let me search for untagged messages.>Yes it does (I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean by untagged)
Okay, how do I do it then? I've searched the web high and low for many years now, and all I ever find are very tedious work-arounds to what seems to be universally claimed to be a missing features.
Btw, by "untagged" I mean "unlabeled",
>> - It doesn't let me search or auto-tag by contact.
>Yes it does (you can search for a contact, and you can setup a filter to auto tag)
I can search by a contact by wading through menus to get to the contact and then wading through a menu to click on "Show recent conversations", but I've lost my patience by then. Why can't I do it from the search box? The search box is smart enough to show me all the emails that belong to a contact, but there is no option presented there to tell Gmail to search using all the email addresses for that contact.
Also, how do I set up a filter to label messages based a contact. Not based on hardwired email addresses in the filter, but based on a contact, that will automatically pick up changes in the contact?
How do I search through all the messages from all my friends, based on the friends that are in my "Friends" contact group? How to I automatically label such emails in a filter?
>> - It doesn't let me view messages in a fully-threaded, rather than flat-threaded format.
> Why would you want this? Gmail's threading system has been widely copied and I've always thought of it as obviously superior.
I don't find it to be obviously superior at all. In fact, it's quite terrible for use with mailing lists, where a single thread can go on for a thousand messages and branch in a hundred different directions. I can't delete subthreads I'm not interested in. I can't easily refile individual messages in such a thread. Even deleting individual messages is less than perfect.
>> - There's a lot of functionality for which there is no keyboard shortcut. E.g., displaying inline images.
>Do you really think there should be a shortcut for something like that? This example is especially worrying because it's a security feature.
Big Google wants to protect me from myself. That's so thoughtful!
>> - The built-in GUI editor often doesn't do the right thing. I.e., it routinely just does weird stuff.
> I have no idea what you mean by this, but I'll assume you mean the rich text editor, and I haven't really experienced "weird stuff."
It happens to me all of the time. The same stuff happens in Google Docs too. Google Docs would be the crappiest word processor ever (no section numbering??? no ability to remove words accidentally added to your personal spelling dictionary???), if it didn't live in the cloud. Of course, it living in the cloud makes it better than all the rest, in the same sense that one's crappy cell phone camera is much better than the $5,000 Leica that you never actually have on you.