Every Flavour Beans

One of my friends sent me a link yesterday asking me to use it submit my ‘dream’ features that I would like Google to add to their GMail service. I like GMail like no other Google product I have ever used; I have abandoned all the previous email ids that I was using once I started to get used to GMail’s Conversational Stacks, Labels, Filters and Starred Items. Ability to track a large number of mailing-lists will be severely limited without these features. Its spam protection and searching ability are also better than that of the others’. My friends love the browser-based chat feature. What else could be added to what is such an excellent product already? The more I use this product, the more intensely I feel the lack of some functionalities. So I didn’t had to think for a single moment before preparing the following list of features that I want to see supported by GMail as soon as possible.

1. The ability to view all the unread messages at one place. There should be a link/button called “View Unread Messages” or something like that which will show only the unread messages.
2. The ability to view all the messages which have no labels.

   I have created a separate GMail Id to track the mailing-lists of different products/services and the emails from each mailing-list are collected(using filters) under their respective labels(‘wordpress-hackers’, ‘gentoo-java’, ’sounder’, etc). Occasional emails do get to my email account which don’t belong to any of the created labels, and such emails are so few that they get lost among all the labeled emails. Even if such emails are 5-10, I have to wade through several pages in the “Inbox” section to read them all. A predefined label called “Unlabeled” containing all the emails not labeled with anything can be very time-saving in such a situation.

3. Disposable emails. I want GMail to allow disposable email ids to be associated with a main account so that the main account can be shielded from those whom we don’t trust(yet) and hence help fight the spam menace. One can create a real GMail id and then use its forwarding feature to get the similar result but a simpler way would be more desirable.
4. Quotes as random signatures. Many desktop email clients support this feature: From a list of quotes entered in the “Signature” box(or uploaded through a file), one quote per line, GMail should automatically select one of them as part of the signature(in place of a placeholder such as ${quote}). It’s boring to use the same quote in the signature for 2 months and having to remember to then manually change it to something else.
5. An option to add signature at the top of the quoted message while replying. I prefer bottom-posting in the user group and forum messages but top-posting for the individual emails. I want the option to select where the signature should be added in the replies, for each GMail account individually.
6. Be able to work with multiple GMail accounts simultaneously.

   Because I love GMail so much, I use it for all my purposes - even for getting group messages from the Yahoo Groups. One GMail id for one purpose though, so that I can control the frequency of checking each id according my preference. But on occasions when I want to check the messages from multiple accounts at the same time, I have to login into one account, check the messages, logout, login into the second account, check the messages, logout and keep going on like that. I have tried to let the browser remember my passwords(Firefox does it by domain name and not by pages, so it doesn’t work when I want to work with GMail, Google Analytics, Google Reader, Personalized Home, etc at the same time. Opera claims to remember by both domains and by individual pages, but it has never worked for me yet) but it didn’t turn out to be the solution I was looking for.

   Because a machine can be shared by multiple users(who might have their own GMail accounts), the owner of a group of GMail accounts can authorize the set of ids which can remain active simultaneously on the same machine/browser. Currently I login into each GMail account from a different browser to get around the problem, but it is still less than convenient. Even when using multiple notifiers(one for each account), I still need to login to check the actual messages and reply to them. They also work only for email and not for Google Analytics for example.

That’s it for now. Do correct me if some of the features I have mentioned here are already supported by GMail(some might be supported as a Greasemonkey script for example) - I am not a GMail power user. I am sure that other GMail users too have their own favourite features that they want to see added to the GMail service. Which ones are your favourites?

UPDATE: sewar has got some nice suggestions in the comment section to get around limitations (1) and (2).