Alexander van Elsas

Well written. In my opinion standards are the problem here. Will there be any company break out and really innovate on e-mail? The risk is, that some new features may not work in every context. This would make things more complicated for "normal" users... - Matthias Schwenk

Google is definitely making the moves. They have taken a lot of steps already, integrated Google talk for example, presence, reduced spam (I never get spam in my inbox). But there is so much more to do as I pointed out ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Matthias, I just realised I didn't react to your point of things becoming more complicated. You are right about that. For that reason I never got around using those add ons that make Outlook "social", xobni for example. Outlook itself isn't "simple". Gmail is a very nice platform though. I like it best, even though they still would have along way to got to implement my wish list ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

What I wish is that someone would come up with a way of telling me when I haven't heard from someone in a long time, or the ability to tag an email to a project (or a label) and tell me how many messages I've gotten on that tag, and what the last one was... So that I could better use gmail for contact management and project management. I have a number of smaller projects that tend to fall through the cracks and while I have tried to come up with a number of ways to handle that, it'd be nice to be built in. - Justin Long

Justin nice list of features. If a few creative people would sit down for it, there are so many possible improvements thinkable. Google seems to be at it, but I seem to hear often the team working on it isn't very big (I don't know). But there is a lot to win still. - Alexander van Elsas

Pity that someone can't come up with a Greasemonkey script that could do it... I don't know anything about programming something like that. It ought to be possible because you can access Gmail through IMAP... wonder if an open source webmail project could be created to "extend" gmail? - Justin Long

Some users have come up with their own strategies of handling email which are pretty good. I've covered this in my Blog post "How to handle Email overload" sachendra.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/how-to-handle-email-overload/ - Sachendra

To me its not so much a matter of managing email - for which there are any number of good suggestions, I use Zero Inbox - but rather better tools for understanding the social connections and the convergence between projects and specific email addressses; the ability to treat email as data for analysis; the ability to better thread conversations; the ability to better expose email threads to more people while keeping some emails private etc. and more - Justin Long

Exactly Justin. I agree. - Alexander van Elsas

The problem is that Outlook has too many features and is too big, but Gmail is designed to only have the features that most people use, right? I seem to recall reading that Gmail was mainly features used by, like, the regular users of email (not so much powerusers). I do wish that Gmail was "extendable" - like Firefox's plugins! That would be great - because then you could plugin the functionality that you need while resisting feature creep. - Justin Long

If Gmail was extendable like Firefox that would be great. - Matthias Schwenk

if you are using gmail in firefox, you can already do a lot to extend its featureset. the bettergmail pack from gina trapani is pretty great. and i'm sure others are working on lots of greasemonkey scripts that will add all sorts of random features. i'm really liking the remember the milk task list in gmail. - mike via twhirl