Boring Questions About Gmail

by Steven Garrity

I’m considering moving some of my mail to Gmail, but have a few concerns with changes in the way I deal with storing organizing mail.

I’m wondering about two issues in particular:

  1. Is it possible to import a large archive of mail (about 1.5 GB currently in IMAP), organized in hierarchical folders and not lose the folder information? I understand that gmail labels are not hierarchical and don’t mind losing that aspect of categorization, but want the folders to map to Gmail labels.

    As far as I can tell, the only way to do this is to import mail one folder at a time (import, label, repeat). I could do this, but it would take days.

  2. Is there a keyboard shortcut to label a message and archive it in one action? I’ve been doing this in Thunderbird with the Quickfile extension.

I’ve been using Google Reader a lot, and Gmail much less. I’m struck that the interface is similar, but different enough to be a bit disconcerting. Google Reader uses “tags” and Gmail uses “labels”. It’s all about nomenclature man!

 

20 thoughts on “Boring Questions About Gmail”

  1. I don’t know about #1 as I tossed out my Outlook archives two years ago and started fresh with Gmail (and have never regretted it).

    #2: While there doesn’t seem to be a label and archive function built in, make sure you get the Gmail Macros greasemonkey script:

    http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html

    I’m sure it’d be possible to hack that in, but I find it to be super awesome as it is. I just hit L – choose macro, A to archive and move on.

  3. Have you considered Roundcube as an alternative? It has a very slick interface — Ajax in all the right places — and then you needn’t put up with ads based on Google parsing your email.

    Roundcube speaks IMAP so you could still use Thunderbird on some machines if you wanted, and you wouldn’t have to move your existing IMAP store.

  4. Brad: Thanks for the info. I probably would use the greasemonkey scripts, though I have a borderline (sic) superstition about using non-default configurations for software. They always seem to require additional maintenance and aren’t always available on every machine.

    Johnny: Yes, the questions are boring. The post title was also a feeble attempt to assuage my guilt at making a post that is of no interested to anyone, but potentially useful to myself.

    Chuck: I do have access to an experimental install of RoundCube. I do like the UI, and I like that it’s an IMAP client. However, it’s lack of filters, and my reliance on server-side spam tagging (which then needs to be filtered by the client), prevents that from being usable. I will continue to experiment in this regard (we’re trying moving spam into another IMAP folder, so it doesn’t have to be client-filtered from the inbox on each mail-check.

  5. If you paired this IMAP client with SpamCop.net’s email service ($30/yr. and includes a reporting tool!) then you wouldn’t have to do the two-step spam filtering.

  7. in my firefox i can run gmail and google reader in the same window.
    it’s a greasemonkey script, i cant remember what it’s called…
    but you could try using that so then you have gmail and google reader in one easy to see space.

  8. In my experience, switching to Gmail from a desktop IMAP client is a really bad experience. Overall, it’s nice enough for webmail, but the lack of hierarchical views (folders, threads) is a problem for me. Other than that, I’ve just grown so accustomed to the extensions and customization of Thunderbird that I can’t live with a simple webmail interface.

    As for spam filtering, the way my server admin has it set up, we have three folders monitored by CRM114 — inbox, junk and unsure. Mail that’s clean goes to inbox, mail it’s not sure about, unsure, and definite junk to junk. If I move mail between those folders, it learns what it did wrong and very quickly starts to become quite accurate.

    With my setup, I find that mostly what ends up in Unsure is mail from (actual) software vendors, and that I’ve never had to move mail *out* of the junk folder. Pretty good because I can use the client or the webmail and filtering works.

  9. Hey Steven,

    Seriously… don’t even worry about the folders or the labels. Seriously. Forget about them. Don’t look back, except sentimentally “haha remember when I had all those folders…geez they took a lot of wasted time to keep organized… haha those were the days, remember the ole Commodore 64 wasn’t that sweet, amazing what they could do with 64K!” etc etc…

    I had the most organized email you could imagine, literally going back years, gigs of email, with a very organized folder structure (I used Outlook Express). I lived or died by my email and the ability to “find sutff”. I still do. By nature I’m a “filer” not a “piler”.

    I was also very wary of Gmail and just “archiving everything away”. I setup labels, etc. thinking (mistakenly) I would need them.

    You know what? You don’t need labels. You really don’t, except in rare circumstances you’ll find appropriate places to use them (eg. filing all resumes received with a “resumes” label, etc.)

    Just read your email, keep it in your inbox as long as it is an “active thread”, reply to it… but when it is “dealt with”… just press the archive button. Presto, magic, it is put away in the magical google black box… and when you need it, you just *search* for it… and I have NEVER yet not been able to very quickly find my message by searching. In fact, it is way quicker than when I used to search via organized folders and/or OE’s slow Find functionality.

    My only concern at this point is that I’m up to about 80% of gmail storage capacity and I’m unclear as to what I’ll do when I get close to the limit. But oh well that problem is for another day!

    Take the plunge, you will not regret it. G-mail is fast, responsive, and as you know, web based is the way to go. If I could sell g-mail for a living I’d be a happy camper.

    You have to do this!!!

    Cheers
    Justin

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