Gmail Blog

I hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but...

Whatever blogspot theme Google uses for this blog is just god awful (oh, I see, this is it: http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmail-blog-has.html), and I swear it gets worse every time I view a post there.

To wit:

When I load the page I see the orange "loading" gears. Then that sliiiiides up to reveal the content. Really? Can they really not innovate here? This is a company that spends massive amounts of resources to get their homepage to load as quickly as possible. Heck, they even penalize companies in their index with slow loading times. And yet they purposefully add loading animations and transitions which add at least a second to page load, and probably more as far as time it takes me to engage in the content.

Also, every time I reload the page I see something different. Sometimes there is text in the black menu bar. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes there is an "extra" screen that slides up after the orange loading gears, sometimes not. Sometimes the sidebar navigation is there, sometimes not. Try refresh a few times yourself and you'll see.

Also, I love the five-second delay for the document URL update when you navigate via the sidebar.

All of these fancy, look-we're-using-ajax, gee-whiz-its-a-single-page-app features -- just for a simple blog post. Talk about complicating a simple problem!

Again, apologies for the rant but I…

I don't see anything 'wrong' with GWT, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with writing iOS apps using Ruby (http://www.rubymotion.com/).

For example the Inbox team did a fantastic job re bringing a great user experience to multiple platforms and I guess they were glad that they could use one language throughout instead of having to jump between various tools and idioms (see http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/going-under-hood-of-inbox.html).

It's just that like you mentioned people do have different preferences when it comes to languages/tools/ecosystems. That's all.

There are people building web services using PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, Haskell, Elixir, Erlang, Go, C++, JavaScript, Dart. Why not also have this choice on mobile?

The thing that annoys me most is that now GMail by default shows images which can allow spammers and marketers to detect open rates and validate active email addresses.

These images are proxied, so the sender can't tell if you actually viewed them them. Only Google can. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

You can also disable the "auto-viewing" of images, as described in the link above.

This is made worse by the fact that marking messages as spam requires you to open the email first.

You can still check the little box next to the email (in the inbox view) and then click "spam". This allows you to mark an email as spam without viewing it.

when I used it with Gmail it would always appear to people as "From me@gmail.com on behalf of me@wherever.edu".

This doesn't happen if you configure an external SMTP server in Google Mail for the alias.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

Moreover, you don't want to use a different 'from' address without sending through the appropriate SMTP server. If the domain has SPF or DKIM set up, a receiving server might reject your mail if it wasn't sent from an expected SMTP server.

Actually, Gmail does something close to that.

When you click "Report as spam", if it detects it's a mailing list, it offers to (try to) unsubscribe properly:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-easy.html

It's a bit strange that they don't give you the option then to unsubscribe without marking as spam (you can do it but with more clicks), but I would think that if you unsubscribe and mark as spam the overall system doesn't take the spam factor at all or as much. In that case, it's probably limited to your own account.

I thought that too, but no. It seems it replaces the original link with a google url, which is basically a proxy address for that original url. It seems they may cache it, but don't preemptively download it when the mail is received.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Obviously if they downloaded any image linked to an email send to gmail that could lead to a DOS, and be very wasteful in any case. So they wait until you actually open the email. But at least it obscures your IP unless you click on the links.