The Evolution of Gmail Labels

googleblog.blogspot.com

23 pointsfrisco3 comments

i see many people whining in the feedbacks, but i'd guess that this change is welcomed by the majority of gmail users.

i like it so far. finally a way to hide labels i don't care about in a "submenu".

the "move to" business and the drag and drop should have their semantics explained somewhere. sometimes it acts like labels are folders, sometimes it doesn't. i'd rather have a true "labels" feel or a true "folder" view (of course as an option to the user), not such a confusingly mixed deal.

Coming from desktop mail apps (Apple Mail, Eudora...) which (almost ?) all work with folders, it was quite difficult in the beginning for me to understand how labels worked.

I guess that's why they are doing this move, labels are just too complex to comprehend for the computer illiterate.

Typical users want to organise mails the way Outlook does, so Gmail adapts itself to the mass without giving up the idea completely.

I sort of (jokingly mind you) consider the new interface twist a much needed category theoretic twist to the interface. Now we can specify mappings from a label to a set of emails (the drag the email to the label action), and mappings from an email to a set of labels (the drag the label to the email action)

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