January 15, 2009

I love Gmail, as does the world. It doesn’t surprise me remotely that it outpaces Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail in terms of year-on-year growth.

As much as I love their conversations view, attachments and slick uploading - it can always be better, and I am sure Google’s usability mavens would agree.

One thing that would really help within the conversation context is having the ability to select what to forward from a master list of attachments. Take for example an email conversation with 6 participants and 15 exchanges. 4 of the emails in this conversation have attachments, some with just one, some with multiple.

Multiple Attachment View

It just so happens that I want to forward one of these emails to participants 7, 8 & 9 within this conversation with attachments from 3 of the 4 emails with attachments. The best Gmail can do is select one of these emails and inherit only its attachments or add more to that email via my filesystem. This means I have to download the other attachments and re-attach them.

Detail Multi-attach View

Ideally, I would like to have an “Include all attachments in conversation” checkbox, that then lists every attachment ever exchanged in the conversation with checkboxes for selection (unchecked by default) and add more if required. Assuming Gmail’s metamodel stores pointers to the attachment vs. storing email metadata+binary content together, it should be simple enough to render this conversation-centric list of attachments and re-associate references to a new mail “item” in the same conversation.

I’ve always wondered with Gmail, if person A forwards attachment X to person B, does attachment X get duplicated in GFS somewhere? or is it just replicated across a couple of locations and just the reference to the file is associated to the new email? Thus, everytime the attachment is viewed, it just hits the attachmentSVC which decides on the closest/available content pool and streams it to the client?

Maybe the Gmail team decided that implementing this logic would yield minimal storage savings, and just replicates the attachments regardless. I would love to know! Anyways, I wouldn’t have requested this usability enhancement if I hadn’t run into it atleast 10 times in the last 6 months. Perhaps others have experienced it too? Let me know!

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