I love Gmail. I finally got my Outlook mail files uploaded to the Gmail servers thanks to their FREE IMAP support (FUCK YOU YAHOO AND MSN) about 4 months ago, and life has been great since. The Gmail applet on my phone may not be as responsive as the push mail on a BB or iPhone, but it’s better than no mail at all until I hit a hotspot or sniff the EDGE connection from my laptop.
But every now and then, I see things about Gmail that drive me nuts. How can a service so perfect have so many flaws? It’s still leaps and bounds beyond anything else, but some of this shit is a no-brainer, or a tiny-brainer. A lot of it should be easily implementable is just inexcusable that it’s broken or missing.
For starters, my biggest gripe off the bat:
No sort by sender or subject? Jesus, that’s a gimme.
The search function is broken as far as I’m concerned, because it doesn’t search for fragments. If I’m searching for ‘check,’ yes, it’ll find every instance of ‘check,’ but it will NOT find ‘checks,’ ‘checking,’ or ‘checked.’ And as if to add insult to injury, I can’t search for ‘check*’, because there’s no wildcard search support.
Fuck you!
Today, I finally tried to use the signature feature, since I’m sick of typing in my signature when needed, if I can just delete when it’s not. Wait a sec. What the…Oh, come the fuck on Google. I can’t have hyperlinks in my signature? Fuck you. That’s a really fucking stupid feature to not have. It’s almost as bad as not allowing multiple pre-scripted sigs, which is another broken part about the signature feature. What if I want a signature for my personal mail and one for my professional mail? Assholes.
And finally, my biggest gripe, you can’t increase the duration that Gmail checks your linked POP accounts. I have my 3 domain-based mail accounts being fetched by Gmail, which is great, because it lets me use Gmail as a replacement for Outlook all together. Except, hey, guess what - You can’t set the INTERVAL for which Gmail checks your POP mail. Which wouldn’t be all that bad, if Gmail didn’t fucking go ONE HOUR between auto-fetches. Yes, that’s right, it’s not even 15 minutes, not even 30 minutes, it’s a whole fucking hour between fetches.
I would PAY for a functional search with wildcard support. I would PAY for 5 or 10 minute fetch intervals. I would PAY for a sort-by-sender/subject feature.
But they don’t even offer me the option to pay, so I’m stuck using what amounts to the best kinda broken mail client out of a field of utterly dismal and broken ones.
</rant>