And that I would almost pay money for.
I mean there are a bajillion add-ons for Gmail — and some of them are even useful — but for the love of all that’s holy, why hasn’t anyone figured out a greasemonkey script to allow Gmail to sort your inbox/folders by its column? It, by its unchangeable default, doesn’t allow you arrange your inbox by anything EXCEPT by date. You cannot, for example, sort by author, or by subject.
I love gmail as much as the next geek, but when my email is piled way high, I find that this single thing prevents me from sorting things out in an efficent way.
Last week, bordering on the brink of email bankruptcy, I would have done terrible things all for being able to sort by author. Doesn’t anyone else notice how much easier it is to sort through email once you’re able to group and SEE your email by common groups? Like who wrote it?
- “Ah yes, all my email newsletters — they are all crap, good-bye” [delete!]
- “Hmmm, notifications from the university — better save them all” [archive!]
- “Email forwards from my favourite aunt — again?” [spam!]
Yes, I know we can “ask” for it to be done with its next ‘upgrade’ or whatever, but why it hasn’t been implemented by now by Google proper, OR, some greasemonkey ninja is simply beyond me.
If anyone does know how this can be done, please let me know so I can do this and help publicize this important piece of information for the world to enjoy.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:54 pm | Permalink
How about trying filters?
July 18th, 2007 at 7:34 pm | Permalink
Not as convenient! Why go through two or more extra steps each time? :)
July 18th, 2007 at 7:55 pm | Permalink
well given gmail’s motto of “search, don’t sort” i doubt they’ll ever offer a sort option. besides, a sort by author would be useless when trying to sort a conversation that has multiple authors.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:22 pm | Permalink
Chris — maybe, but then I’d want to “search” that. For everything else, it makes a lot of sense, I think.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:25 pm | Permalink
What GMAIL REALLY needs is IMAP….
July 18th, 2007 at 9:56 pm | Permalink
Tony, I agree. Search pulls too many results and puts them in some weird order. Sometimes I just want to sort by author and find the email that way.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:07 pm | Permalink
@Tony: I would agree with Hsien Lei’s comment on using the filters. Wouldn’t it be helpful to set the filters up and that way it would only be a ‘one time’ chore. Pardon me but I didn’t get the concept of ‘2 steps each time’ as in your reply.
But on the whole i do agree that it lacks the various sorting options like in Outlook for example where you can sort by practically anything. Temporarily at least i believe advanced search would be a brilliant substitute…dont you think?
July 18th, 2007 at 11:17 pm | Permalink
Bentley: here are your two steps. 1) open up filter 2) set filter.
And you want me to do that for every potential author I have in my inbox? Surely you jest, sir! :)
And that’s *besides* the inefficiency of using *each* filter *each* time to find your documents.
I mean, how much easier would it be to actually have a link over the author column (where there isn’t any right now), and you just click on it? Presto-magicko — all done.
Or would that be too simple?
July 19th, 2007 at 3:19 am | Permalink
You could always use the “from:” prefix to search for authors more closely. For example, if I have a number of notifications from Facebook that I have already dealt with and want to delete and a couple of other emails about Facebook that I want to keep, search for “from:Facebook” and it will only return the messages sent by Facebook, then it’s select all and delete!
That’s a good way of searching for authors, here are the other operators available: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190&topic=1579
Hope this helps!
July 19th, 2007 at 4:26 am | Permalink
For me, it would be nice that when I click the “ALL” to select all emails - I actually get all that I want to select. Currently, I only get the first 50 or all the posts.
For instance, I’m using gmail to email backups of about 35 blogs MySQL databases to - every day. I’ve reached the gmail 2.5G limit twice now. What I want to do - is delete a range of backups, usually the oldest in my gmail account, but leave the month-end ones. It would be nice to just select a range from e.g. February 1-27, 2007 and click delete. Instead, I can click “all” and only the 50 displayed gets listed. There is an option to delete the entire list of 3000+ incoming emails, but I do not want to do that at this time. Instead, I’m deleting the oldest 50 at a time, except month-ends - to get me back space once again.
It’s one of those “$Dialing for Dollar$” things that irritate me (if you are an SCTV fan, you would know what that means - it BUGS me!)
July 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm | Permalink
I have to second or third the filters suggestion. That is *exactly* how I do those same operations.
Create the filter and when it asks you if you want to apply it to the existing conversations say yes.
Gets the job done, and more importantly gets it done forever.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
@engtech:
I just don’t see how setting up filters is easier than a one-click ’sort’ on authors, or dates, or even subject lines for your inbox. Am I missing something?
July 19th, 2007 at 12:51 pm | Permalink
I don’t think it’s faster for a one time thing, but it’s definitely faster for long term.
For stuff I want to read later I would put a label on them, skip the inbox, and leave as unread.
I have put “delete filters” on relatives who don’t understand not to spam.
It’s still quick to do because there aren’t many options for filters.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:30 pm | Permalink
see what i have always found it to be lacking in gmail is its inability to sort based on status (i.e., unread, read). it would make life so much easier, esp. after a long (i.e. >24 hours) period of time away from the Internet. if there’s any gmail engineers out there, maybe consider doing that with your do-anything-you-want time? :)
August 9th, 2007 at 4:38 pm | Permalink
@wendy:
when in gmail do a search for:
label:inbox label:unread
pretty much any missing functionality is available as a search operator.
August 13th, 2007 at 6:13 pm | Permalink
…when using a filter, instead of:
label:inbox label:unread
…just type:
is:unread
November 5th, 2007 at 6:43 pm | Permalink
[...] isn’t the first time I’ve talked about it, and its still mind-boggling how this feature is still noticeably absent. I know that some folks [...]