Topic: Why is Gmail so weird?

[Pugnate]

Although I love Gmail, I find a lot of things it does are confusing and odd. I rely on it to stay in touch with editors constantly but we all experience confusion only because of the format.

For example, when you forward someone an email... they won't see it on their computer screens unless they press "..." below. This sucks. Often I'll forward to an editor something crucial, and occasionally they will say... I don't see anything... or a deadline will pass because they will assume the forward is coming. I've had this happen many times. It happens less now that people are coming to terms with it, but what the hell?

The second thing is how chains of conversation work. It all becomes a part of one email, which is great and streamlined, but occasionally very frustrating and confusing.

Again, this sucks when you are forwarding.

So you've been exchanging emails with an interviewee and there is an email from this chain you need to forward only to an editor. Now you hit forward and suddenly the editor is part of this chain even if the interviewee wasn't added to the forward. I know he's not receiving the forward or your emails to the editor, but it is all part of this thread.

I find it off putting..

Just to see, I sent the email to my Hotmail.

While Hotmail sucks overall, it isn't so confusing.

[Cobra951]

My main email is hotmail (formerly--now they've rolled it into their Outlook stuff).  It's straightforward--new messages on top, no cryptic groupings or tabs.  It has amazing spam filtering, and an easy way to blow away everything I have accumulated from specific senders.  The worst thing about it is that they keep increasing the resources their client eats up.  I switched to the straight-html "light" version recently because of how slow it has gotten on my old system; but it has other issues, like not remembering which senders are safe.  I have to click a second time in every email to allow all the default-blocked stuff.  But the page does come up in a few seconds.

I also have a gmail acct, which I use for everything that isn't personal or important.  If it gets hacked because of some unsafe website-forum membership, it won't hurt me much.  I agree that it is unnecessarily confusing; and the convolutions happen without you soliciting them.  I haven't tried to unravel it too much, but I think it's possible to flatten it out somewhat.  Have you fiddled with the settings much?  I did get rid of the tabs once.  And while I'm not sure, I think you can turn off the grouped conversations.

Not seeing forwards at the same level as regular emails is ridiculous, though.  I'm surprised they haven't gotten beaten up about that.

[scottws]

I agree that it can be difficult to make sense of Gmail conversation flows, especially if there are more than two people involved and people are responding to different emails in the conversation.  It gets really bad if you have one of those people that like to put their new content on the bottom of the email chain.

I've since learned to reply to specific emails and then I remove everything below that for simplicity.  That way it is easy to see what I'm replying to and keeps the conversation much simpler.

[Pugnate]

I agree that it can be difficult to make sense of Gmail conversation flows, especially if there are more than two people involved and people are responding to different emails in the conversation.  It gets really bad if you have one of those people that like to put their new content on the bottom of the email chain.

I've since learned to reply to specific emails and then I remove everything below that for simplicity.  That way it is easy to see what I'm replying to and keeps the conversation much simpler.

Yup. Pretty much.

I can see what Gmail is trying to achieve with this whole style but surely there is a less confusing way.

[Xessive]

Have you tried accessing Gmail through the new Inbox version? https://inbox.google.com/

Maybe it will help (or make things worse) but it's worth checking out at least.

[scottws]

I love Inbox and use it exclusively, but I'm pretty sure Pug's specific issues remain.