Friday, June 27, 2008

Beta testing Gmail

After some interesting discussion over blogger I shifted focus to Gmail. To my knowledge one of the longest Beta product is Gmail. One strong feature I like is labels, which is far more superior than historic folder. Today surprisingly noticed a unexpected behavior in the labels, I call it a bug.

The steps are simple to reproduce:
1) select any mail conversation in your Inbox thats labeled, Open it.
2) Expand the conversation and delete the first message of it. (Yes Gmail allows to delete a single message from a conversation)
3) Return back to Inbox.
4) Now look at the conversation, Err! the label is deleted. :)

You need to relabel the conversation. The engineer has optimized the logic of associating the label with the first mail of the conversation. So when thats gone, the label vanishes. Instead, it should associated with a conversation or all mails in the conversation. Or add a condition

if(message.isFirst() && labeled == true && conversation.isNextAvail())
conversation.getNext Message().label = message.label;
del(message);

You can follow any progress on this from here.

5 comments:

SA said...

That's a bug.

and what happens when you move the mail back from trash (undo)?

You know what should happen!

Vijesh said...

SA,
That seems work as expected. The label seems to carry over.

But interestingly I noticed that irrespective of a message in archive or inbox, it can only be restored back to inbox. Thats bad. Even Y! does the same.

bkennelly said...

When you label a conversation, all existing messages are labelled. To lose the label from the conversation, you must delete all labelled messages.

In the scenario presented, the label is applied to the only existing message, so it is only necessary to delete one.

If there are multiple messages, it is only necessary to re-apply the label before deleting any messages, to preserve the label on the conversation.

This could, of course, be implemented in the Gmail delete logic, if enough people request it.

Vijesh said...

Thanks Brain.

I din know the difference between applying label to a conversation and applying it to a message. Makes sense. Hoping more users try this occational scenario.

Vijesh said...

More testing, more questions! watch here