Is it my imagination or is gmail totally counter intuitive??

I just spent 20 minutes trying to find an attachment to an email someone sent to my gmail account. I don't use mail much so everything is in my in box. I can find the email I want in there but when I click it I don't get the email but instead all the emails I sent this person as part of that 'conversation' as google calls it. After messing around fruitlessly for some time, on a whim I tried the 'sent' folder. There wer my eamils I sent this person so I clicked on one and weirdly all his emails appeared - I clicked on the one I wanted and there was the attachment.

Is that totally bonkers or what?

Cheer

Ian

I am glad you pointed this out, I was starting to think that I was totally inept with todays technology. Gmail sucks, I use it but it is just not intuitive.
Cheers

Junction said:

I am glad you pointed this out, I was starting to think that I was totally inept with todays technology. Gmail sucks, I use it but it is just not intuitive.
Cheers

Click to expand...

I have the same problem with Facebook. I don't have a page myself but I try to manage one for a musician friend. Stuff appears all over his page that we have no control of. We get email notifications but trying to tie them to parts of his Facebook page is impossible. Many of the music upload sites he is on are just as baffling.

Do the young people of today have a completely different mind set???

Cheers

Ian

I found it good, wat's the prob? Looks like any other Email account i have seen...
Don't recall having the problem you had...
I see attachments on bottom of the email, simple as that in my case, but it can be just a problem of settings?
can't tell as it was running like that from the start.
As for Facebook, you have a bunch of settings to configure to not get things all over the place, or restrict stuff etc...
Anyway after sometime you get use to whatever....

ruffrecords said:

Do the young people of today have a completely different mind set?

Click to expand...

A valid question, and the answer might be a 'yes'. Things used to be simple, tune into those few TV and radio channels we had, read the same newspaper or two every day. Anyone born past '90 has had to adjust to an assault of media content from every direction. The brain is too delicate and malleable for that to go on unnoticed, in good things and bad.

The sorting can be quite baffling.  I feel fairy comfortable with it, yet at least once a year they make some major change to the layout and operation which requires a relearn. 

zayance said:

I found it good, wat's the prob? Looks like any other Email account i have seen...
Don't recall having the problem you had...
I see attachments on bottom of the email, simple as that in my case, but it can be just a problem of settings?

Click to expand...

I see attachments at the bottom of emails when I first look at them. However, if I reply to that email, the problem I described occurs whenever I subsequently try to access that email.

Cheers

Ian

I partly fixed it. In settings I turned conversation mode off and now it look more like a normal email box. After a bit of searching I even managed to set up some folders to put the stuff in.

Cheers

Ian

Surely google wouldn't have any incentive to scan the mail on their servers for key topics to learn more about the customers for targeted ads?

it's only bidness....

;D ;D ;D

JR

zayance said:

As for Facebook, you have a bunch of settings to configure to not get things all over the place, or restrict stuff etc...
Anyway after sometime you get use to whatever....

Click to expand...

That's a good idea, change the Facebook settings. OK, where's the settings tab - nowhere to be found. Scroll to the bottom of the page, nothing there but there is a help label. Click on that, navigate to how to change my settings. Ah, it says click on the star shaped thing at the top right of every Facebook page. Yeah, that's intuitive, NOT.

Cheers

Ian

Hmmmm. I've been on gmail for maybe six years and am pretty used to it. I went with the paid version @ about $4.16/month and don't regret it at all.

TBH, once you dive in a little it is very full featured and I recommend the "conversation view". Helps a ton in keeping a "conversation" threaded and easy to review over a period of years even.

The paid version has no advertising and can easily be set to your personal domains plus you incorporate g-drive, docs, etc....

I'm using gdrive now to share / sync session files & video media with remote talent as well as their video-chat/conf tool to pretty much work and meet in RT across continents.

Google calendar blows away any calendaring solution that I am aware of plus it's integrated with all of your contacts, email, docs, etc.... All devices can sync over-the-air too.

I had the opportunity to go back to more standard email clients like outlook, thunderbird, ak-mail (one of my fav's), etc and feel like those are way behind the curve.

Google search is pretty fast and impressive for accessing emails/attachments from years past. There are a number of manual scripting options for filtering, automation, and such that may require more complex solutions than point-and-click but that works most of the time. Attachments in conversation view are indicated with the paper-clip icon on that email.

ALL-MAIL shows both received and sent, IN-BOX is just rcv'd (non-archived), and sent is sent.....

If you use the drop-down search "expanded/advanced search" you can specify to return conversations/emails with only attachments of specific attributes.

Please take my comments with a grain of salt since salt makes the gool-aid taste better.

Cheers,
jonathan

I am also a big fan of gmail - been with it since it launched and it seemed really intuitive from the first. But I haven't used anything else for years so I have no benchmark.

I would agree with Jonathan's recommendation for threading the conversations.

Stewart

ruffrecords said:

zayance said:

As for Facebook, you have a bunch of settings to configure to not get things all over the place, or restrict stuff etc...
Anyway after sometime you get use to whatever....

Click to expand...

That's a good idea, change the Facebook settings. OK, where's the settings tab - nowhere to be found. Scroll to the bottom of the page, nothing there but there is a help label. Click on that, navigate to how to change my settings. Ah, it says click on the star shaped thing at the top right of every Facebook page. Yeah, that's intuitive, NOT.

Cheers

Ian

Click to expand...

It's supposed to look like a gear - which is the symbol for settings in many applications.

Gmail + Android devices (I have a Galaxy SII, and ditched the iPhone + all Mac devices when each and every one of them failed on me either physically due to horrid build quality/QA or had some unexplainable software failure that deleted all of my data, multiple times) have changed my life and I couldn't be happier with the interface or stability. The automatic sync for free makes iCloud look rather amusing in comparison and the fact it all just works, is truly fantastic. It takes a little bit to set up, but once you are, it's trivial to maintain.

The main concerns I hear are from people who use Outlook Express. After being on Gmail now for many years I can say I get tears of pain every time someone opens up Outlook trying to convince me it "makes more sense", but I do understand the inertia of learning something new.

I understand it might suck now, but once you get past the "OH, THAT'S where is it" type suite of issues, you'll grow to love it.

The searching in e-mail is also generally pretty good, especially if you take time to learn the depth of potential complex search patterns. For instance searching by date or what have you.

I tend to agree however with the Facebook interface complainers. As a professional software engineer I would slap their UI designers around for a good while if they presented me with the Facebook interface and called it a finished product. It's probably the least efficient and most confusing user interface I've ever used, and I spend all day in horridly designed 3D apps like Maya. It continually amazes me that people with zero knowledge of how to program can fly around it like it's second nature, yet tell me that writing code is difficult....

I agree it works great, but there's a lot about the layout that is counterintuitive if you've never seen it, and counterintuitive if they've just changed it all.....again.....and again......and again......

emrr said:

and counterintuitive if they've just changed it all.....again.....and again......and again......

Click to expand...

It's a problem I notice in a lot of software products, and, the way I see it, it's inherent in the business model.
Just like for profit medicine needs the people to stay sick and preferably in need of daily medication, software engineers will have to quit their jobs unless they keep continuously coming up with useless updates, bloated features, counterintuitive designs...
???

> Surely google wouldn't have any incentive to scan the mail

They do read your email to display targeted TO-YOU ads in the web interface. Sometimes you actually see the connection (an email question about email backup got PC Backup and PC Fix ads).

I'm sure they summarize "all" mail they can see to guide their strategy. I pity the poor computer who has to read all that drek. (I used to do email support and most email is not worth the bytes, much less my time.)

I just wrote 3,000 words about Gmail for a colleague who is being fired and needs to archive and close her work email (oddly the employer is not reclaiming it; they can always find it in their backups).

My strong advice to older users is to enable IMAP in Gmail and then use a decent email client to get your email. Thunderbird works with few quirks. LookOut is supported. Win7's 'Mail' is the first MS email client which tempted me, and it is surely supported. IAC, a proper PC client will fetch and cache all your emails, type locally instead of through a TTY loop, let you save locally, and won't clutter your eye-space with ads.

What I don't understand is why they (Google, Facebook etc) find it necessary to make such a huge uncoordinated paradigm shift. We have been using drop down menus and tool bars for years  because they are extremely effective. Now you have buttons and drop down boxes plus random clickable icons all over the place. There is no order, no consistency which means you have to go up a steep learning curve for each application. To me that's plain stupid.

Cheers

Ian

ruffrecords said:

zayance said:

As for Facebook, you have a bunch of settings to configure to not get things all over the place, or restrict stuff etc...
Anyway after sometime you get use to whatever....

Click to expand...

That's a good idea, change the Facebook settings. OK, where's the settings tab - nowhere to be found. Scroll to the bottom of the page, nothing there but there is a help label. Click on that, navigate to how to change my settings. Ah, it says click on the star shaped thing at the top right of every Facebook page. Yeah, that's intuitive, NOT.

Cheers

Ian

Click to expand...

The settings tab is on top right of the page, it's marked as a gear wheel, it takes you to some even more confusing things, but that's what it is.
Facebook was never intuitive, my first time was like... what's this thing????...., and yet millions of people got used to it, yes very odd.
Gmail on the other hand, never felt that problem, was pretty obvious from day one.


EDIT:

There is no order, no consistency which means you have to go up a steep learning curve for each application. To me that's plain stupid.

Click to expand...

I guess this brings some interest for people too, they need changes ones in a while..., and it's the platform war i guess, everybody wants his own identity etc...

PRR said:

My strong advice to older users is to enable IMAP in Gmail and then use a decent email client to get your email. Thunderbird works with few quirks. LookOut is supported. Win7's 'Mail' is the first MS email client which tempted me, and it is surely supported. IAC, a proper PC client will fetch and cache all your emails, type locally instead of through a TTY loop, let you save locally, and won't clutter your eye-space with ads.

Click to expand...

This is the correct answer. The Apple Mac mail program works well with GMail, too, according to my friends who use both.

(I don't use GMail because I registered a domain ages ago and use that.)