Yet Another Annoying New Gmail "Feature"

In the past few days on a number of occasions I've been reading e-mail messages that ended abruptly. They ended at "[Message clipped]  View entire message." This adds steps to reading e-mail: noticing the truncation, clicking on it, and then closing the resulting new tab.

Not helpful. I still wish Google would hire someone with expertise in HCI, user interfaces, user experiences, etc., rather than stumbling along toward a higher entropy state. Their algorithms folks are great, but their UI folks truly suck.

Jesus, Google!

Apparently someone at Google has decided that composing an e-mail is too straightforward, and so they've decided to muck with Gmail yet again. Zoho, anyone?

Gmail Labs' "Send and Archive" vs. "Undo Send"

I've long found Gmail's Undo Send feature to be very useful. I often send without fully proofreading, and this gives me a chance to retract and correct a message before it really goes out. Nice.

Send and Archive is also a nice feature. When replying to an e-mail, rather than separately sending and archiving, one can send and archive with a single click.

The rub, however, is that send and archive doesn't have an undo control, and so now if I fail to proof a message, tough, it is gone. Ultimately, one has to decide which feature is more important, and I'd rather appear literate than save myself a click now and then (well, several times per day).

Gmail Button Labels

Gmail has a "feature" that allows one to change the obscure button pictographs back to readable labels, and sometimes it even works. In Firefox I find myself having to refresh pages to get the labels to show instead of the execrable pictographs. I don't want to have to refresh just to know which frigging button archives a message.

New Gmail Stinks Maximally

First impression after spending ten minutes looking for a way to revert back to the much more usable older interface was where's my calendar gadget. My next impression is that I just replied to an e-mail, and there's no god-damned archive button.

I'm sure one of those obscure pictographs will perform the archive function, but doesn't Google have a single software engineer who has spent even a minute thinking about usability??

Gmail's New Interface: Stupider than I Originally Thought

As bad as I originally thought Gmail's new interface is, it's worse. They have hidden the 'choose font' button behind a T. Sure, T stands for font. I get it. This is what it looks like:

The T between the underline and the font size selector is for choosing font. Blogger, and every other GUI I use, uses a stylized F for font. Perhaps Google thinks it's powerful enough to change the word from 'font' to 'tont.'

This is just more evidence that Google's new interfaces for Docs, Gmail, etc., are not well thought-out and are simply change for the sake of change. Overall, replacing words with obscure pictographs and then using letters that have no apparent relation to their function are slaps in the faces the user community.

New Gmail Interface Sucks

Have a gander at what Google is about to inflict upon its user community:

• At the left center is a left arrow. That, from within a message, indicates return to the containing folder. This isn't new, and is fairly intuitive.
• Next is a box with a plus sign in the middle. We're supposed  to magically intuit that this means archive. Yup, much clearer than using the word "Archive.".
• Then we have a circle (very close inspection makes it out to be an octagon) with an exclamation in it. I don't know about you, but I don't find spam exciting, so never in a million years would I have guessed that this button marks the message as spam. Certainly is clearer and more intuitive than the current button labeled "Spam."
• Next over is a trash can. Fine.
• This is followed by a shape vaguely similar to a manilla file folder. Much clearer than the current button labeled "Move To."
• This is followed by, maybe, a luggage tag, which is supposed to represent "Labels."
• Not shown in the above screenshot the right and left arrow buttons, retained from the prior interface, which move to the previous and next message. Which goes to previous and which to next? Hell if I know--I always guess wrong the first time. Yes, a bad interface feature from the prior Gmail version retained for the next Gmail version.

So Google is screwing up Gmail just like they screwed up docs, though maybe not as bad as they are screwing up the Blogger interface. There's an airhead in a video explaining why they are doing this, but it all comes down to "some illiterate moron thinks pictures are cooler than words."

Google Hates Us

First Google Docs. Now Gmail. Google is trying to push us to unattractive interfaces with the idea that we are basically illiterate, unable to deal with words on the screen, and hoping to switch to obscure pictographs. Gmail's new interface is ugly, with little contrast between the foreground letters and the backgrounds, it spaces things out so that screen real estate is used poorly, it forces us into greater use of frames meaning that the arrow and page up/down keys are less useful, and, other than that, I don't like it.

Spamming, Phishing, Authentication, and Privacy: it's not 2004 Anymore

I was just reading the Inside Risks column in the December 2004 CACM, and was struck by the opening statement: "It isn't news to most readers that email is becoming almost unusable." This was largely because of spam and phishing.

Kids these days have no idea how good they have it [ insert emoticon ]. Spam and phishing are almost non-problems for me now that both my personal and work e-mail accounts are hosted by Google. Gmail's spam filtering is excellent and even on the off chance that I have a look at a spam message, Google is good about flagging e-mail as possible forgeries, possible phishing, etc. Just a year and a half ago thing were not so good, but that was largely because UMBC was hosting its own e-mail, and occasionally e-mail from legitimate UMBC users would be shuffled off to my spam folder by UMBC's spam filters.

There are two minor annoyances I still have with spam.

1. One is that there are a number of putative conferences that apparently send to mailing lists harvested from academic web sites. These tend to be in south or east Asia, and fall into two categories: outside my interests, or not prominent enough that I've ever heard of them. It's not that they are necessarily bad conferences, but if they were any good, why not get the word out through legitimate channels?
2. A former co-worker apparently shared his e-mail address book with a social networking site cum spammer [ yourfanbox.com ] that repeatedly reminds me that Tom U. wants to connect through that site. Or maybe someone broke into his account. Or possibly they are complete forgeries. Gmail categorizes them as spam, but still the first few times I saw the name of this former coworker, I looked at the e-mail. Of course, Gmail doesn't open remote images, so there should be no way for the spammer to know I looked.

Added 2011-10-13: the spam claims to be from yourfanbox.com, which claims to have offices at FanBox  113 West G St, STE 510, San Diego. There is a link to control future e-mails, but no way I'm visiting a spammer's web site. Not from my machine.

Migrating UMBC E-mail to Gmail

Some months ago UMBC began migrating e-mail to the Google cloud. This migration has been voluntary, but everyone will be moved over in January. I like Gmail, and considered moving some months ago, but decided not to because it was unclear whether there would be a solid wall (psychologically as well as logically) between my personal Gmail account and my UMBC Gmail account. This will not be an issue for a number of reasons:

(1) The accounts are separate, one reached via mail.google.com and the other via gmail.umbc.edu. I can reach both via the traditional mail.google.com URL, but with two different user names. I plan to explicitly go via (and link to) the gmail.umbc.edu address.

(2) I usually use Chrome for Gmail, but use Firefox for UMBC (myUMBC) services. Firefox add-ons allow me to selectively turn off undesired scripting within myUMBC and Chrome does not display PeopleSoft slop properly (I suspect it really does, however, and that PeopleSoft is simply not following web standards, but this is something for future investigation). So I will continue to use Chrome for personal Gmail, and will use Firefox for UMBC mail.

(3) I use different themes for the two Gmail services, and so my work and my personal screens look very different.

(4) The UMBC Gmail has "myUMBC" prominently displayed in the upper left.

(5) If all of that is not enough, I can simply return to an IMAP client for UMBC e-mail and continue to use the browser for personal Gmail.

The one drawback I have seen in my initial look is that Google says it may take several days for my old e-mail to migrate to Google. Since I have switched, I can no longer access UMBC Squirrel mail, and so none of my old e-mail folders are currently available via the web. Since grades are due in a couple weeks, this could become sufficient motivation to temporarily configure an IMAP client on my laptop. However, I do not foresee much inconvenience here except possibly delaying my grading of assignments submitted via e-mail.

I do suspect there is still a way into squirrel mail, but do not plan to spend any time finding the way.

Disabling Google Buzz

Those of us who use Gmail recently got a surprise with a new "feature" called Buzz, a Facebook wannabee. A Gmail user can disable Buzz by deleting his or her profile. Unfortunately, the Buzz button still clutters the Gmail interface, so it's necessary to also go into the Labels tab in Gmail settings and hide Buzz.