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General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support
« Last post by JavaJones on March 05, 2011, 02:13 AM »I totally understand where you're all coming from. What I love about Gmail is... it stopped me really caring about filtering, for the most part. The search is (usually) good enough that I can find what I need without having filtered it. I do use a medium-sized set of labels, but only about 10% of them are used frequently (things like "Financial"). I could and should probably get rid of at least half of them, I really never use them, they're just they're for archival organizing purposes.
Anyway back to the search. It's good and it's fast. But it's not perfect. Gmail does have some glaring omissions, like the ability to control sort methods (e.g. sort by author, reverse date sort, etc.). But again the important point is that ultimately I found the mail I'm looking for as quickly or more quickly using search than I would with filtering, folders, tags, etc. So that's a win for me.
The pitch of Gmail then is essentially "let go and let Google" (manage it). A scary mantra for many, I know. But it works for me. It's the same thing they're essentially saying about web search.
All I can say is that it can be incredibly liberating to realize you don't need all those folders. It's like the feeling Everything (file search) gives you for your file system. I care a lot less about which drive folders something is in now too. And as our volumes of data get larger and larger, I think good search (and largely auto-generated meta data) are going to become the *only* ways to really manage it, at least while maintaining your sanity.
All that being said if I could have a desktop interface to an IMAP store that does everything Gmail does as well as things desktop mail clients are better at (like sorting), then I'd be even happier. But that doesn't seem to exist yet, and desktop mail clients are not better for my needs than Gmail at this point. Too many advantages in Gmail's favor for my usage.
- Oshyan
Anyway back to the search. It's good and it's fast. But it's not perfect. Gmail does have some glaring omissions, like the ability to control sort methods (e.g. sort by author, reverse date sort, etc.). But again the important point is that ultimately I found the mail I'm looking for as quickly or more quickly using search than I would with filtering, folders, tags, etc. So that's a win for me.
The pitch of Gmail then is essentially "let go and let Google" (manage it). A scary mantra for many, I know. But it works for me. It's the same thing they're essentially saying about web search.
All I can say is that it can be incredibly liberating to realize you don't need all those folders. It's like the feeling Everything (file search) gives you for your file system. I care a lot less about which drive folders something is in now too. And as our volumes of data get larger and larger, I think good search (and largely auto-generated meta data) are going to become the *only* ways to really manage it, at least while maintaining your sanity.
All that being said if I could have a desktop interface to an IMAP store that does everything Gmail does as well as things desktop mail clients are better at (like sorting), then I'd be even happier. But that doesn't seem to exist yet, and desktop mail clients are not better for my needs than Gmail at this point. Too many advantages in Gmail's favor for my usage.
- Oshyan
