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Gmail Wishlist: 5 Features I’d Like to See

By Nikhil Pai on July 13, 2008

Gmail, arguably the best free email service around is not without its shortcomings. While Google has made a lot of enhancements to Gmail since its launch, there are still many things that could make it even better. Here are the top five features on my wish list:

1.  Custom “From” emails without the “sent on behalf of” tagline:
Gmail’s custom ‘From:’ feature lets you send messages with another address in place of your Gmail address. However, in such cases, your Gmail address is still included in your email header’s sender field with the result that some versions of Microsoft Outlook displays “From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com” This in our opinion defeats the basic purpose of introducing this feature and users are left with no option but to use Google’s separate service, Google Apps for Your Domain.

2. Option of Folders and Labels:
GMail currently uses Labels in place of folders to manage your email in your Inbox. While Labels do have their own advantages over Folders, it would not hurt Google to provide an option between using Labels & Folders to effectively manage email.

3. Whitelisting:
Gmail allows you to block a particular email address from sending you an email. But it does not provide the option of whitelisting an email address to ensure that certain important emails never go to the Spam folder.

4. Better Contact Manager
Gmail’s contact manager is quite ordinary and does not provide any advanced options such as merging contacts provided by Yahoo Mail & Windows Live Mail.

5. Display Mail Size
Gmail currently does not display the size of the emails in the inbox. This prevents sorting of email based on size. Of course Gmail is already at 6 GB+ of space…but still!

Do you also wish to suggest any improvements to Gmail? Just hop on to the Gmail Help Centre: Suggest features section and let Google know what features matter to you. Google also provides the option to suggest “Want Gmail to do your laundry?” Well, as Google themselves says, it never hurts to ask.

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Nikhil is a Chartered Accountant who works in the Mergers & Acquisitions team of a leading telecom infrastructure company in India. He has a passion for technology & blogs on internet technologies, mobiles, gadgets, software & social networking.

  • http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ Ionut

    “GMail currently uses Labels in place of folders to manage your email in your Inbox.”

    Gmail will add an option to “move” an email to a certain label, combining labeling and archiving in a single step.

    “But it does not provide the option of whitelisting an email address to ensure that certain important emails never go to the Spam folder.”

    Add the email address to your contacts. There are some exceptions from this rule: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10514 , but it generally works.

    “Gmail’s contact manager is quite ordinary and does not provide any advanced options such as merging contacts.”

    It will.

  • http://googlesystem.blogspot.com Ionut

    “GMail currently uses Labels in place of folders to manage your email in your Inbox.”

    Gmail will add an option to “move” an email to a certain label, combining labeling and archiving in a single step.

    “But it does not provide the option of whitelisting an email address to ensure that certain important emails never go to the Spam folder.”

    Add the email address to your contacts. There are some exceptions from this rule: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10514 , but it generally works.

    “Gmail’s contact manager is quite ordinary and does not provide any advanced options such as merging contacts.”

    It will.

  • Doc029

    #1 Google plays by the rules, Microsoft breaks them, and everyone “blames” Google. The “on behalf of” is Microsoft (and a minority group of other software companies, based on pressure from Microsoft) breaking the rules for their own purposes. If we bow to them being wrong, we prove “might makes right” instead of “RIGHT makes right”.

    #2 If you want folders so bad, add a label to a message, then archive. That’s all
    your HD does. When you move a file from one folder to another, it just adds the new label, and removes the old. The “file” remains just a string of 1′s and 0′s on the platter.

    #3 Ionut covered that fine.

    #4 I don’t use GMail as my PIM, and therefore it’s fine for me. Gets the job done nicely. To each his own I guess there.

    #5 If getting at your largest messages is that important to you (who cares about the 40 million small ones :) Then access your account with IMAP and a decent client (I use T-bird) and it’ll see the sizes and let you search/sort on them. Then you can act on them, and it’s reflected in your account. Honestly, doing this ONCE was all I needed to realize I was being too retentive and just forgot about it since.

  • Doc029

    #1 Google plays by the rules, Microsoft breaks them, and everyone “blames” Google. The “on behalf of” is Microsoft (and a minority group of other software companies, based on pressure from Microsoft) breaking the rules for their own purposes. If we bow to them being wrong, we prove “might makes right” instead of “RIGHT makes right”.

    #2 If you want folders so bad, add a label to a message, then archive. That’s all
    your HD does. When you move a file from one folder to another, it just adds the new label, and removes the old. The “file” remains just a string of 1′s and 0′s on the platter.

    #3 Ionut covered that fine.

    #4 I don’t use GMail as my PIM, and therefore it’s fine for me. Gets the job done nicely. To each his own I guess there.

    #5 If getting at your largest messages is that important to you (who cares about the 40 million small ones :) Then access your account with IMAP and a decent client (I use T-bird) and it’ll see the sizes and let you search/sort on them. Then you can act on them, and it’s reflected in your account. Honestly, doing this ONCE was all I needed to realize I was being too retentive and just forgot about it since.