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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

#171

Post by yogo »

hartror wrote: post #21
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.

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.

Same here. For a couple months tabs where I habitually selected text (repeatedly) would crash in Chromium (on Linux). It almost cured me of this habit but it doesn't seem like this happens anymore.

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

#172

Post by shill »

kalleboo wrote: post #162
shill wrote: post #120

Wow, it's a slow news day on HN today. Here is the email feature I want. If I paste a URL that looks like a post/article into a new message, I want the slug automagically split, title cased and copied into the subject line. For example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/the-greatest-google-mail-feature-you.html Would generate this subject: The Greatest Google Mail Feature You Yes, this was a bad example because the title h…

Or they could just do what Facebook does and load the page server-side and get the real title.

Yeah, that would be the ideal strategy for pages with an og:title tag.

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

#173

Post by dmortin »

kahawe wrote: post #157

While we are talking about greatest features and GMail... it would be awfully nice if they would finally implement some sort of sub-string search, given it's almost 2013 and they are synonymous with searching and finding things on the internet. It is incredibly frustrating that in order to be able to find an email I received years ago I have to figure out exactly how someone might have written a certain term in that…

I use Opera for this. It is set to periodically fetch my mails from Gmail and I do not use its builtin mailer to send/receive/read mails (I use the web interface for that), but if I need a substring search then I open the Opera mail search panel and it allows me to dig through my past mail with substring search.

Edit: maybe it is doing prefix search only (I dont' know I search prefixes usually), so it's no true substring search, but prefix search is very useful in itself.

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

#174

Post by dmortin »

GFischer wrote: post #159
kahawe wrote: post #157

While we are talking about greatest features and GMail... it would be awfully nice if they would finally implement some sort of sub-string search, given it's almost 2013 and they are synonymous with searching and finding things on the internet. It is incredibly frustrating that in order to be able to find an email I received years ago I have to figure out exactly how someone might have written a certain term in that…

Yes please :) . If a third party implements this, I might use it as well :) (I don't care how - POP3 offloading to my PC?). Well, I'll add it to my "startup ideas" list :) .

See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844064

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

#175

Post by GFischer »

dmortin wrote: post #174
GFischer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes please :) . If a third party implements this, I might use it as well :) (I don't care how - POP3 offloading to my PC?). Well, I'll add it to my "startup ideas" list :) .

See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844064

Nice, didn't know about that feature of Opera.

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

#176

Post by paulirish »

RossM wrote: post #154
paulirish wrote: post #146

The greatest Google Mail feature you're not using is definitely Forward All. Forward an entire thread of emails, in chronological order, somewhere.

Is this a lab? The only option I have available is "Forward".

It's in the More dropdown.

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

#177

Post by cbr »

shill wrote: post #120

Wow, it's a slow news day on HN today. Here is the email feature I want. If I paste a URL that looks like a post/article into a new message, I want the slug automagically split, title cased and copied into the subject line. For example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/the-greatest-google-mail-feature-you.html Would generate this subject: The Greatest Google Mail Feature You Yes, this was a bad example because the title h…

Fetching the url and sticking the "title" in the subject might be better.

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

#179

Post by tammer »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #127
tammer wrote: post #119

Great! Except lately I've come to despise ui elements that can only be discovered by accident. An easily usable and effective feature that I only find via a blog post is a feature that could use some visual feedback.

This is an unfair comment. Think about all the features gmail has that aren't buttons in the UI. Would you really like 1) Buttons for all of these 2) some pop-up or otherwise annoying message coming up for each of these features when your trying to write/read an email?

I think that's the challenge of good UI - being visually informative without overloading the user.

Subtlety is a difficult thing to achieve in any field. Silence, however, is anything but subtle.

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