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The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

blog.jgc.org

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Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#43

Post by w1ntermute »

leephillips wrote: post #26
w1ntermute wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bottom-post all the time when emailing certain (tech-savvy) individuals. Makes it much easier to reply point-by-point. However, bottom-posting's value is lost on the vast majority of people, so I don't bother unless it's someone I know will appreciate it.

I can't be sure, but I suspect that what you are calling top-posting is the opposite. Top-posting refers to the sloppy practice of just pasting your reply ("posting") on "top" of the entire quoted email, rather than quoting selectively and replying point-by-point, as you're supposed to do.

Woops, my bad. I meant to write "bottom-posting".

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#44

Post by ralph »

I'd like Gmail to do better as an email client confirming to standards. If someone sends me an email with the Resent-{From,To,...} headers then I want them shown to me. How can I forward an email as a message/rfc822 MIME content-type rather than a poor rough text approximation in the main body?

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#45

Post by iamjs »

dlss wrote: post #5

I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading. This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then reply again to get my desired behavior. In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.

So happy to see that others have this habit of selecting and highlighting bits of text as they read. I've been ridiculed for it, but I'm not the only one!

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#46

Post by dice »

pauljz wrote: post #29
hartror wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.

I'm kind of happy to have just learned I'm not the only person in the world who habitually selects like this. I've done this for as long as I can remember, and the NYT thing drove me nuts as well. Oddly enough I guess I always habitually deselect as well, so I've never noticed this gmail feature. Pretty useful. Now if it browsers supported Sublime Text-style multiple selections for quoting several different bits of a…

Do you also use your text selection as a bookmark?

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#47

Post by trhtrsh »

hackmiester wrote: post #9

Wow, great, a condescending title! Fact is, I am using this. It used to be in the settings, I think, which is how I found out about it. And as others have stated, it's in a lot of mail clients. Apple Mail supports this, as does the iOS mail app, too. "I haven't heard of this feature" != "no one knows about this feature".

Wow, I gave jgc credit for the non-obnoxious title, and then I realized that the title is obnoxious, but the HN gods improved it.

Re: The greatest Google Mail feature you may not be using

#48

Post by vvhn »

jemka wrote: post #23
mibbitier wrote: post #13

This is a horrible misfeature. Often, I select bits of an email, to copy and paste elsewhere to check things. Then I hit reply, and wonder why only the currently selected text is there. There should be a way to turn this "feature" off.

Thunderbird does the same thing and I agree with you. I've learned to just hit reply, then edit.

mail.app on OS X also does this ( can be turned off i think ) and its always a similar annoyance to me ( select something to copy paste and the reply only has that)
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