I love Gmail, but...

I love Gmail. I really do. But there are some things about Gmail I just don't understand.  I'll limit myself to just two things for today since I am really not supposed to be blogging right now. :)

Advanced Search

Using the search box at the top of Gmail, you can search quickly through gigabytes of email.

• To search a label, you say, label:label_name.
 
• To search for email that you sent previously, you say, is:sent. Same is true for read and stared.
 
• To search for something in the trash, you say, in:trash. The same is true for chat, drafts, spam, and “anywhere” which searches all the Mail including Trash & Spam

Now I realize that syntactically there is something attractive about saying that something is "In" the trash. By the way, labels are not exactly the same as the trash. Labels are Google’s equivalent to a sort of a folder, except an email can be “in” several labels at the same time. This is a very useful concept although it may be a hard one to get used to if you are a long time Outlook user where email can only be in one place at a time. Nonetheless, having three different options to search different kinds of message storage categories (in, is, label) is troublesome and Google’s Advanced Search is not forgiving if you use the wrong modifier. One more possible point of confusion. One might consider another Gmail  syntax has:  as in has:attachment. Now has:  could have been applied to labels as well as attachments because a message has a label. This potentially throws a forth syntax into the confusion.

The only saving grace is that there is a UI which will write the query correctly for you. But it is much faster to use the keyboard shortcut / (slash) and just type the query.

Lastly, I'll throw in that I dislike that you want to search by date, You search using YYYY/MM/DD format. Yikes. Maybe it is me, but I don't typically write my dates that way. I suppose it gets around deciding weather to use US or European style dates, anyway. Good references to Google's help and a good blog entry.

Signatures

The second thing I find frustrating about gmail is signatures. Gmail does not have: HTML signatures or separate signatures for each address associated with the account. Nor can you choose whether you bottom or top post. These seem to be pretty high on the list when I read some of the Gmail newsgroups but Google hasn’t gotten around to adding them. They did add a nifty little addition in Google Laps that allows you to add a random quote to your signature, but I haven't had occasion to try it yet.