Gmail: Messages I haven’t replied to. Please?
I’m hitting all my channels for this one. Now that I’ve imagined how beautiful life would be if it existed, I have to have it: gmail needs a “messages I haven’t replied to” filtering option.
Here’s how I do email right now: a message comes in, I read it and think to myself, “interesting, I should reply to that”, and then something shiny pops up and I get distracted and forget (this is the internet, after all), and before long everyone thinks I’m an asshole because I never respond. About once every two weeks, I hit my “friends” tag and look for the conversations with an odd number of messages (because, honestly, I’m pretty terrible at initializing email exchanges), and try to catch up. But why am I guessing? Shouldn’t there be a clear and easy way to tack on a “not yet replied to” criteria on a filter definition?
The solution available now is ‘mark as unread’ or starring for things I read and want to come back to. The problem with these approaches is that ‘unread’ isn’t semantically correct (I have read it), star is semantically vague (right now I star ‘important’ messages, whatever that means), and both require you to remember to do them to be effective.
The only potential problem I see with this feature is that I get a lot of mail I’m never going to want to reply to (most of it, by far, in fact). That’s why I think this works best as a filter criteria – I can throw it in along with other filtering options, like people I know I actually want to talk to, and then I don’t have to worry about wading through the messages I don’t want to bother with.
Another feature I would absolutely love to have: transparent external service messaging. For instance, being able to follow Facebook message threads as gmail conversations, and being able to respond directly from gmail. Most of these services have an api, it would be absolutely killer if gmail could plug into them. Looking around for something like this brings up Xoopit for status updates, but I’m morally opposed to using a service with such a dumb name (not really. But they want my gmail password, and that’s a dealbreaker), and anyways, status updates aren’t nearly as important to me as messages (again, lazy – if they follow messages too, I didn’t see it in all 20 seconds I spent looking).
Anyways, make enough noise, and they’ll basically have to add this, right?
Here’s how I approach that problem. I have a folder called “@Reply” where I place anything that needs action. I also use a folder called “@ToRead” which just includes stuff I need to look over, but not necessarily act on. I use Apple Mail, rather than the Gmail client – I’m still a fan of applications over web apps.
Posted by Bevan Houston on 20 March 2009 @ 7am