"If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense."
Nope, bad idea. I inadvertently hit keys often enough that the message "No messages are selected" is engraved in my brain. Don't make these bad key hits do actions.
If you click the little blue arrow in the top-right corner of an individual message, there is a "Filter messages like this" option. It has been there for quite some time. Also, marking a message as read is "<shift> + i".
Decent critique of Gmail, but the title seems a bit of a misnomer -- it really seems like an article about Gmail, with a few mentions of Pine thrown in. Given that it's presented as "X vs. Y", I would have at least expected the "Bad" and "Ugly" sections to have some comparison showing how Pine was better in those regards.
I actually use Gnus and Mutt with my Gmail accounts, via the offlineimap <a href="http://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap</a> Python app. It creates a (ridiculously huge) maildir and then I can freely browse it with Gnus, Mutt or any other MUA. It syncs read/unread, labels/folders, etc. both directions. It has filtering, renaming, and other nice stuff you can put between your maildirs and Gmail accounts.<p>I run it on a cronjob. With this setup, I get the great Gmail interface (and push support to my iPhone/Nexus One) when I'm on the go, and the lightning-fast Gnus/Mutt interfaces for blazing through mailing lists when I'm at a computer.<p>One problem is that sometimes offlineimap throws exceptions and doesn't finish a sync. I think it needs some touching up or updating. I haven't lost any data, though.
The single reason that I choose gmail over desktop clients are the conversations - the ability to see all email <i>bodies</i> of one email exchange in a single page is indispensable for me. Another smaller reason is a search. If some desktop client would implement conversations (but by displaying email bodies, not only headers like Outlook or Thunderbird do), I would probably switch.
It's interesting that so many of his issues still apply.<p>My personal beef: have you ever had a message mis-identified as part of a conversation? Or, ever had someone reply to a message with a slightly mangled subject line or other hint to GMail that it's a separate discussion?<p>I will declare my undying appreciation for anyone who tells my how to manually separate a message from (and alternatively, attach a message to) a conversation.<p>The inability to "bounce", ie. re-send, was also very jarring for my personal workflow. I understand why it's not there by default, both from a user understanding perspective and from a technical "don't break SPF/DKIM" one, but it's unbelievably annoying not being able to "bounce" a message from account to another (ie. from an apps account to a gmail.com account, for example).<p>I'm surprised to see so many people who are happy with Gmail's labeling; conceptually, tagging email is fantastic, but the UI experience in Gmail is awful. (Too much friction is involved. When I sit down to label something I don't want to select one or two from a drop-down, I want to just type a series of applicable tags in one shot, perhaps with a bit of ajax auto-fill-in. With so many other nods to keyboardists elsewhere, this still surprises me.)<p>Not that complaining about this stuff on HN will address any of it for me. ;)
I got to agree about the lack of "bounce" - I could never move my work email to gmail for that reason alone (not to mention my preference of writing emails in my native editor).
And there is room for improvement in gmail yet. I've always been incredibly frustrated by gmail's inability to forward complete conversations. Here they are, all together. And now I can forward them to someone, one at a time, or I can... do what? Go to "print", copy the HTML output back into an email?
Old as the article may be, if anyone is interested: <a href="http://sup.rubyforge.org" rel="nofollow">http://sup.rubyforge.org</a> is a gmail-inspired command-line mail client. Threading, tagging, full-text search, hooks etc.