The Gmail petition to Sergey Brin

Dear Sergey Brin, I read online somewhere that Gmail was created to fill your own need to manage your email online. Then you were kind enough to share it with the world. For that, I and millions of others salute you. That’s why I’m writing this petition to you personally; You see, I also want to be free of my desktop constraints. I want access to all my email, from any computer, no matter where I am in the world. My problem is that I have about 8 years worth of archive email that I need access to, and it is trapped in Microsoft Outlook (shudder). So I come to you, humbly asking that you hear this plea: give us folders in Gmail and a Google-engineered way to import email from Outlook. Your first objection might be to folders, but I must have them, and I think I can convince you why they are important.

The importance of folders

We’ve all been enamored with tagging and labels since the advent of delicious, flickr and the like. But I’d just like to point out that they aren’t entirely suited for every situation they’re used in. Case in point: Gmail.

I am used to how I have my folders and sub-folders organized in Outlook. I have a specific system that lets me drill down multiple levels and still feel uncomplicated and organized. This is where labels in Gmail fail. They can act like multiple folders when you apply multiple labels to a piece of mail, but there is no sense of organized orientation. For instance, I can’t drill down into my “Clients” folder, then into “A Client” and then into my “Manage” folder where I keep all settings for their site. I could search on all those labels but then I have to remember them and hunt around to select them- and that’s just too much work.

Labels in Gmail are great because you can assign multiple labels to an email, which would be like putting it into multiple folders, something you just can’t do efficiently in the standard folder system in Outlook. But as I mentioned above, folders and sub-folders can give you organized orientation, which helps when you are searching for something. I know the search function in Gmail is very powerful, but it’s not perfect because if I need a setting for a particular client, I know right where to go in my folder system, whereas searching would give me too many results and waste a lot of my time, frustrating me in the process.

Also, sometimes I forget what exact key words to search for. Top level folders help direct my path, and each child folder helps jarr my memory a little further. Folders actually help my memory by giving me little tests to complete (couldn’t be in that folder, must be in this one). Currently, if I have a lot of emails in a client folder, I can search once I’m in that folder, and that helps. So search is good, but not the final solution. You decided you needed labels after all, and once you have labels, I contend you need folders. A marriage of search and labels and folders would be ideal.

So the happy medium is what I like to call “pseudo-folders”. Give me the option to have an ajaxed folder tree in Gmail that looks like folders and sub-folders but is really just labels with an added sense of context. In other words, when I click on the “Clients” pseudo-folder, it will know what other labels I’ve opted to place inside it. When I click on a sub-folder or sub-label, or whatever you want to call it, Gmail would be doing a filter search on the top folder label and the sub-folder label. In other words, it’s giving me a visual representation of multi-label search and enabling me to go on happily using my beloved folder system. Because the psuedo-folders would be built on top of your established label architecture, they would be trivial to implement.

The cool thing is I would still get the main benefit of labelling- I’d still be able to assign one email several labels if I wanted to. Ah, the best of both worlds. I recommend that Gmail create this psuedo-folder label system as a display preference. Give me an ajax tree editor in the option area that lets me drag the labels from a pool of labels, into the tree. It would be so very useful and would allow those in my situation to switch to an all-gmail solution.

But it’s all moot without an import feature

In addition to folders, I also need an email importer to completely rid myself of desktop drudgery and domination. Currently, I have to use a home-jobby third party utility to convert my outlook email database from the closed .pst format to the open mbox format. Then I have to use another third party tool to access the emails in the mbox file and resend them to Gmail. The mbox format creates a file for each folder in my Outlook folder tree, so the resend step is very tedious and repetitive. And I have to make sure the third party program is actually resending them rather than forwarding them, otherwise Gmail marks them down as all coming from me (instead of from their original recipients).

Of course, I’m lucky if I can resend them at all since all that email traffic can cause problems with my local internet service provider (which for some reason requires that I use their email server). Lastly, no matter what I do, Gmail lists the date on the resent emails as the date of the resend, instead of the date I originally received them.

Conclusion

So as you can see Mr. Brin, the masses of desktop email users desperately need your help. We are stuck in a weird sort of hell where we can see and appreciate the beauty of Gmail, but we can’t fully bask in its unfettered glory because we are still chained to our desktops. You’ve already added features to Gmail that indicate you want people to be able to use it as an email platform. For instance, the “send as different email” feature is particularly brilliant.

I can only hope that, insulated though you may be by your success, you can still be reached by a passionate plea. I have no power, except my voice, and who knows what that’s worth?! Yet I still hope you will respond. Since this is a public letter, I would now encourage all readers to leave a comment here if you support this petition. Lastly, a sincere “thank you” goes out to all who have taken the time to read this rather long winded tome.

Addendum

Two additional feature needs have come to light. They don’t have much to do with being free of desktop domination, but they are important nonetheless because they have to do with using Gmail as a platform, as a central place to check all your email accounts. First, the “send as” feature has a glaring flaw; email sent from one of your other accounts shows up as “From: me@gmail.com on behalf of me@myotheraccount.com”. That confuses the recipient and reveals that you are using Gmail as a master account. Why not make a “show on behalf” option that we can turn off?

Second, we need to be able to check other email accounts using POP and IMAP. For the IMAP, we don’t need full protocol support, just the ability to get the messages off the server. We need these features for two reasons: one, not all email providers offer a forwarding feature, so we need another way to get the email. And two, email that is forwarded looks like it comes from the forwarding address; this means spam sent to the email address being forwarded will look to Gmail like it comes from a trusted source.