Gmail Gripes

False Positives

Nobodys perfect: Gmail and spam by James Fallows. February 10, 2007. Another person with false positives.

May 4, 2007. I purchased lobsters from mainelobsterdirect.com. The company sent me three email messages as my order went through the various stages of fullfillment. Each message was classified as SPAM by Gmail.

November 5, 2006. I was transferring a domain to the registrar directnic.com. As part of that they send an email to the Administrative contact of the domain. In this case, my Gmail account received the message from directnic and Gmail flagged it as spam.

October 2, 2006. I own a computer from a company called Velocity Micro. In the past I have communicated with the company using my gmail.com account without incident. Recently however, Google started incorrectly labeling all messages from velocitymicro.com as SPAM.

I looked for a whitelist option while viewing a SPAM message, but there isn't one. I went to define a filter, but you can not white list a sender using filters. I had to RTFM to learn that adding an email address to your contacts list is the only way to whitelist it.

Providing feedback on Gmail is hard, the feedback form is buried many levels deep. I was lucky I found it at all.

Not Well Thought Out

Update: April 27, 2006. A reader of this page says that it is now impossible to create a "yourname" Gmail account and then create one as "your.name". Perhaps Gmail has changed things recently? 

April 23, 2006.  My inbox today had an order confirmation for an order placed by "Michael Horowitz" in Manhattan Beach California with a retail web site. As I live in New York, I was concerned that it might be identity theft, so I called the company and, luckily, it wasn't. The billing address they had on file for their Michael Horowitz was in California. 

How did this happen? It's Google's fault. 

The email message I received was addressed to "michael.horowitz". This is strange as my gmail email address is "michaelhorowitz@gmail.com" (no dots). I searched the online Gmail help and found an item that says they ignore dots/periods in the username when delivering email (see below). That is I will get anything sent to

• michael.horowitz 
• m.i.c.haelhorowitz 
• michaelhorowit.z 
• etc. 

That explains why I got the message, but why did the retailer send it in the first place? Did the other Michael Horowitz make a typo? 

Turns out that despite being in beta for a very long time, Gmail is still not fully baked. There is a logical flaw in the design. 

When you open a new Gmail account, they honor dots/periods. That is "michael.horowitz" is treated as a different account than "michaelhorowitz". No doubt, the other Michael Horowitz, opened a Gmail account with the period-in-the-middle username. My password does not work when I log on to Gmail as "michael.horowitz", so they definitely are two separate users to Google. 

The result? Two people get screwed. I get someone else's email and the other Michael Horowitz never gets his email.

I told Google about this and received a boilerplate auto-response.  

Reading a Message

May 15, 2006. While reading an email message, the big buttons at the top of the message are Archive, Report Spam and Delete. What, no Reply? 

And why are there two links to go back to the inbox? Isn't one enough? 

And why are the "action" links scattered to the wind and inconsistent? One inbox link is next to the title and one is next to the gray buttons. But, the link to print the message is in yet a third location. 

There are links for More Actions and for More options. Yet one is a drop-down list box and the other is normal link. It's as if the user interface was designed by a teenager who just learned about the HTML widgets and had a class assignment to use each one on a web page. 

Even amongst the text links, there are two different font sizes. 

In all, the UI presented when reading an email message reminds me of the ransom letters from kidnappers in so many movies, the ones where each letter is cut out from a different source and pasted together to make it impossible to trace. Even the most basic thing, to color shade the side columns and/or the message in the center to help visually distinguish one from the other is ignored. I don't think you could design a more ugly, inconsistent and hard to use interface for reading an email message if you tried. 

FYI

Am I receiving someone else's email? from Google. As of April 23, 2006. Quoting: 

Gmail doesn't recognize dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations. messages sent to your.username@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are delivered to the same inbox, since the characters in the username are the same.

Backups

One problem with any web based email system is backing up your messages. I know of no webmail system that allows for making local backups of your online email folders. I read the Gmail documentation and they too, don't seem to provide for local backups. 

Update: May 15, 2006. A reader of this page reminded me of the POP3 forwarding offered by Gmail which can be used to make backups. Gmail is unique (as far as I know) in offering free POP3 forwarding. The system can both send email to a normal email client (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc) and also keep a copy on the Gmail web site. In this respect, Gmail is better than any other free webmail system. 

However, my point above was about after-the-fact backups. That is, for someone who did not set up POP3 forwarding and now has email at Gmail. There is no feature to allow the downloading of a group of messages to your computer.