My Letter to Google about why I am not happy with Gmail:
“Dear Google, When I visited the Gmail help forum I was hoping to find some helpful contributors who could tell me how to sort my emails alphabetically like I am used to doing in every other email program that I have ever used in my entire life. Instead of getting help, I got to read where 3 different so called “Top Contributors” are telling me that if I don’t like the current features of gmail that I should just leave and use another email program. Not only is that not helpful, it is insulting, and degrading, and it makes me think that the Google Corporation must be a bunch of arrogant pricks who don’t give a damn what will actually make their loyal followers happy when using the gmail program. It is like you people at Google are conducting a psychological experiment on us to find out how we will react when we don’t get the features we want, no matter how much begging and pleading we do. But in the end I suppose that Big Brother knows best, so don’t pay any attention to my misguided discontent. After all, I’m just a lowly level 1 user who uses Google Apps for work. What they hell do I know? I’m not high enough in the food chain to be able to understand the features that are truly best for me.“
Getting emails from unsolicited parties, it would be nice to view the in box in an orderly fashion. Thereby, one can quickly cherry pick the the spam & important emails like a Las Vegas dealer clearing the table of chips after the roulette wheel stops.
Using the search option is fine for when you know what you’re looking for, but it does not account for the noise. The noise being unsolicited email. Simply viewing the in-box without an order (items not filtered or labeled) leaves one with a signal to noise ratio of 1 (i.e. indiscernible). Just using the the search feature is like describing an elephant peace-meal. Some will say there’s massive ears, others will say in stands of feet as big as tree trunks, but nobody sees the big picture. Franklin Covey talks about seeing the Whole, the parts, and the sum of ALL the Parts (the Whole in high definition).
Just a cog in a wheel,
Paul
I completely AGREE WITH PAUL!!!
Gmail, what can be done about this problem? It really needs some attention.
Every other service I have used has had the ability to sort by sender, subject and date.
Connect with an IMAP client that supports sorting.
Or make use of the search box. It is fast and easy (especially if you turn on search autocomplete from the gmail labs menu in settings).
Find an IMAP client? Use the search function? Is this a joke? Meaning no offense, but ATT, Yahoo, SBCGLOBAL, — most if not all of the other providers have alphabetical (or by subject or by date of reception) right there front and center in their email. Whay doesn’t gmail do this?
Meaning no offense, but ATT, Yahoo, SBCGLOBAL, — most if not all of the other providers have alphabetical (or by subject or by date of reception) right there front and center in their email.
No offense either, but feel free to use those then.
Who responded?, “No offense either but feel free to use those then… ” if it was from google, that is somewhat offensive, and arrogant – for a so-called high\ tech email service its hard to believe Google can’t fix a simple thing like this, which is the most useful email tool of any I’ve used on any service – its been constant frustration not being able to sort alpha on click of a button – I’ve warned anyone who’s asked about gmail of this major problem and I agree it is time to move to another service, and get the word out for others to consider the same!
What do you want to achieve by sorting alphabetically? If you want to achieve displaying images by sender, this can already be done in Gmail:
- go to Contacts
- click on a name (or multiple names)
- click on “Recent conversations – Show”
You can also use advanced search. Combining it with Quick links (in Labs), you can create a series of customised links to custom searches.
gravi_t et al, I believe you are missing the point.
What these folks (and me) want to do is see all the emails listed alphabetically by sender. That IS what we want to do, and I don’t believe there is any substitute possible via filters or whatever. It is simply a basic view.
Why do we want to do that? There are a few reasons for this:
1) To quickly see all the edresses which have sent to me, when I’m trying to find something for which I cannot remember the senders name (often some kind of merchandise order, or somebody I don’t correspond with much, or…). It is a lot easier to view a list that looks like “Alan, Alan, Alan, Alain, Alain, Alain, Alex, Alex, …” than a list that looks like “Alain, Alan, Alex, Alain, Alain, Alan…” Of course that’s too simple an example; if you have lot of email it looks much worse-just a big jumble spread over many pages.
2) It’s quicker in that view to check for deletion stuff you don’t care about, like expired offers from Travelocity or such. Ya, I could filter for “Travelocity” but then I would have to repeat that for every merchant. It’s a lot easier just to see an alphabetical list.
3) Likewise quicker to move/tag stuff in chunks
The point here is that you cannot set up filters or whatever for addresses that you don’t know are there. Alpha sort lets you see what you have, much more easily than looking through an unsorted list.
?Is that clearer?
If there is some non-obvious way to sort alphabetically, we’d love to know!
Otherwise, we’re puzzled as to why Google is missing what we regard as a very basic function. Every other online or corporate email service I have ever used has alpha sort-why the heck doesn’t Google?
What’s wrong with Josha’s suggestion?
Go to Gmail help, type IMAP in the search box and press Enter…
I’m DONE with gmail….I organize people’s lives for a LIVING…and the Alphabet is a simple way to organize in many ways…my clients that are doctors…guess what the files are in alpha order…NOT in the date order they came in to see the doctor……my clients that are songwriters….guess what we file the songs they write in ALPHA order….not the date they wrote them….okay you get the idea…this is from KINDERGARTEN… use the alphabet or organize….to not be able to hit a simple button to either organize in alpha or date makes gmail BEHIND IN THE TIMES!!!!!!!!!!!…….gmail is like having all your folders thrown into one BIG pile….YES there are labels to put them in…but that is when you want to file it AWAY IN THE CABINET AND NOT VIEW IT FOR A WHILE………………..I guess gmail has not looked at the needs of their users……..sad.
It’s completely ridiculous not to be able to sort any column alphabetically with the click of a button. The lack of this feature is beginning to drive me nuts. I can organize emails 100 X faster in Yahoo mail than I can in Gmail, as well as find and delete unwanted or outdated garbage as well. I’m seriously considering cancelling my Gmail account for good because of this. Yahoo mail is far more intuitive than Gmail. I don’t want to program filters; I want to organize my goddamn mail.
Totally agree Nicholas. Gmail has so many whistles and flutes that it’s forgotten useful simple functions like sorting. I’ve switched back to BT/Yahoo.
Amen to all of the folks who want to do a basic simple alpha sort. It is frustrating. But.. it is comforting to know that others have the same feelings. I thought at first I was just missing something and was a dummy for not knowing how to do a sort!
It’s totally fantastic that gravi_t is a top contributor on this forum – and totally appropriate given that he/she (I’m guessing it’s a “he”) has no clue why anyone on earth would want to alphabetize their mailboxes. I laugh at you and your comments!!
The fact that so many people (including me) have taken their time to bitch about no having the ability to do an alpha sort is proof positive that it should exist.
In the five years I’ve been using Gmail, I have never felt the need to organise emails alphabetically. Occasionally I do want to see emails written by one person, I go to Contacts, select the name and click on “Recent conversations: Show”.
But grav_t, obviously many others (like me) DO want to organize their emails alphabetically. Your solution – which you keep repeating – is too cumbersome. The question is WHY Google won’t offer this function when so many users want and need it. Does Google realize that this is a public relations issue for the company? As more and more folks abandon gmail, this can’t be good for Google. Why not just go ahead and provide this feature? What is the problem?
On the email service I have switched back to it takes ONE click to sort all my emails into email from,subject, date or size order. Each of these I use periodically and can’t do so on this service
maintaingarden,
Feel free to use any other service.
In case Google needs more reasons to provide an alphabetic sort function, I am a college instructor and need to have my contact groups arranged the same way they’re arranged on all of my rosters, alphabetically. This way, when students drop from the roster, I can quickly see who has dropped and delete from the contact group so they don’t keep getting no longer wanted e-mails from me about a class they’re no longer in.
I sympathize with those of you who find this situation incomprehensible given the kinds of innovations, such as “clouding,” that I hear about every time NPR interviews Google’s CEO. Could it be that they’re getting some kind of sadistic pleasure out of seeing us lesser mortals tearing our hair out.
Searching and sorting are two different tools. Saying that either one is the only tool you need because it is possible to find any given piece of information without the other is besides the point. Each tool excels at different things and you do better by having both available than either one alone. Searching is better, by quite a lot, if you have a very good idea what you’re looking for, even if there are a lot of similar items. For example, you want all messages that involve someone with a last name of Smith – you’ll figure out the rest when you get there. If your notion of what you’re looking for is too vague to construct a useful search, you sometimes get there more easily by perusing the results of a sort. An example is a message that you got around six months ago, from someone whose name you’ve forgotten but probably starts with an “M” or “N”, you’re fuzzy on who they worked for and you remember the subject really caught your attention at the time but you can’t recall it. This is the mental chaos most people deal with and it’s quite surprising that people can actually peruse a date sorted list and pick out that message in a few tens of seconds.
While it is a useful discussion to consider if a computer can search or sort for a given piece of information faster, people enter a query with a wide variety of incomplete information and limiting yourself to either tool will mean many queries will simply fail (you can’t find what you were looking for).
This is an interesting discussion. One opinion seems to be that searching and sorting are both useful tools and that it would help to have both available. Another group observes that they have been happy with only search and have never needed sort. For those who say that search is all they need, and already have it, what exactly do you lose if sort were added for other users?
Not to beat a dead horse (I love horses by the way), having a one-click option to list your emails alphabetically by column headings (name, subject, date, etc.) is a MUST-no question about it. Gmail, I am very new to your service, and I am extremely disappointed this basic feature is not part of the package.
Personally, I almost never miss sorting, given the organizational and search features that exist in gmail. I do understand that some people think in a different way or organize in a different way and would benefit from sorting. But at the end of the day, you have to be aware that not every application is going to work for everybody. If sorting works best with the way you think, then there are lots of mail clients that will work great for you.
Problem: GMail refuses to provide one-click alphabetize feature;
Solution: Go to FACEBOOK, set up a DUMP GMAIL GROUP; if we get the message out to 180 million, including the overwhelming majority of gmail users as aggregavated as the rest of us, they will listen;
Dump gmail,
Jim
Can’t someone develop “an app for that”? I share the frustration. Kept thinking that surely they’d add it soon!
I am also not happy with g mail I think it is the worst email I have used. there is no easy help & the interface is lousy.