Gmail Retires 5 and Graduates 6 Labs Features

Losing the fixed-width font is annoying to me. I frequently have code or logs in emails, and these are horrible to read in a variable width font because columns don't align, and ^^^ indicators don't line up. I'm curious why this was abandoned.

Gmail is really interesting. I'm a big free-software fan - I really dislike running non-free stuff on my own computer. Not so much for RMS reasons, but just because I like the freedom to hack on stuff as I see fit, and partly just to support open source (it has given me <i>so</i> much over the years). I've never had that hangup about online services though, even though logically they're not really that different. And indeed, I switched to Gmail several years ago because their anti-spam was (and still is, I think) way better than what I was able to cobble together with Linux.<p>However, every now and then I'm reminded that in giving up some freedom, you pay a price. I would love to try and hack in a feature to Gmail that makes it permanently associate certain From email adddresses with people. For instance, if I write someone and set the From to @dedasys.com, I want future email with that person to always use that address. If I use the @apache.org address, then that should be used in the future, unless I change it. I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.

R.I.P. Location in Signature. Was an interesting feature for those that traveled a lot (and thus not require us to explain any long delays in email reply time). Although I did forget about it from time to time. Boy did she not like seeing "Sent from Las Vegas, NV, United States" in my sig..

No wonder fixed-width font goes away due to not being used. Why did they have to insist on setting the message's font to "Courier New, Courier, fixed" instead of just fixed?<p>Courier is even worse than the proportional standard. Why not respect the setting that was defined in the browser?

Thanks, Google, for continuing to provide useful features in Labs.

Noticed my 'go to label' shortcut got updated. I like the new interface much more than what it used to be, but am not a fan of the scroll area jumping around.<p>The 'gl' (go label) shortcut used to display an auto-complete text box in the center of your gmail window to enter a label, now 'gl' jumps to the search box and automatically prepends 'label:' to the query. It makes much more sense to do it in the search box, but doesn't feel as fluid as the old one.

Noooooo, fixed width font was the best!

Anybody else sad to see muzzle go? I think rolling over contacts in the gchat pane in order to see their status messages is perfect. Now I will only be able to see half as many contact names...

I can't believe they're retiring "random signature" I so <i>thought</i> about using it. I could have had a different funny quote in my signature for every email I sent.