Gmail: you love, you hate, you live with? Now it's different.

@Barney

Good thing you didn’t hear that they want to change purple.

@PlacidPenguin Now you’re being mean.

@Barney

Me being mean? Never…

@sammydog01 in general, giphy doesn’t do much for me. This one however justifies the existence of the entire genre.

@DrWorm I’m lucky. My name is unique. There’s only a few of me. This is why I don’t use my real name for anything except real important stuff.

@DrWorm @RiotDemon I’m the only person in the world with my name, one of 7 left with my last name.

It drives my dad crazy that I beat him to [ourLastName]@gmail.com

@DrWorm I hadn’t thought of this.

@Barney @DrWorm I’m guilty of doing that to someone- once @polksaladannie was having a medical issue and I kept texting emails to firstInitialMiddleInitialLastName@gmail.com, when her real email has a 13 at the end.

Guy was nice enough to let me know it was the wrong email, then I argued with him that I knew it was right. I feel like an ass about that, but I was freaking out a little at the time.

@Barney @DrWorm @PolkSaladAnnie @Seeds

I feel like arguing with somebody about whether their email (or even phone number) is correct should be mandatory for everybody to experience at least once.

@DrWorm i feel your pain. When i got cable Internet in the early to mid 90s i was able to secure beverly@cox.net. I also had beverly@yahoo and beverly@hotmail till they became too much to deal with. I changed tactics over 20 years ago and gave them all up. The spam and misdirected emails were unbearable.

@DrWorm I have this same problem with my djslack address.

I have someone’s Facebook account (now turned off), a guy in Australia that keeps cc’ing me on stuff he sends to his wife about their house and vacation plans, and a few other winners.

Sometimes if I have a few free minutes I’ll mess with them. I once told a group of people and their real estate agent trying to lease a house in Canada that I absolutely would not lease a house with them, that it was a terrible location for me, and I didn’t trust them to sign a lease with them, oh yeah, it’s because I don’t know you and you don’t know your friend’s email address.

It is amazing how many companies require no kind of confirmation to get an email address on their system but have ridiculous levels of proof required to talk to them to get off. Today I started a round with a power utility in Colorado.

Yep, having a simple Gmail address ain’t all some people might imagine it would be.

@DrWorm My personal one is both easy to remember and unique so I can give it to people and they’ll tend to remember it. Oth, my girlfriend’s is simply her first and last name, which are incredibly common, particularly in Italy. She gets emails from Italian banks and companies every day. Makes for a real pain to try and contact them or unsubscribe if the auto-translate isn’t available. She doesn’t check her email often and asks me to, so I get to see all the stupid crap she gets.

Funny story about it though - she was getting emails from Match.com with messages from guys. I knew it wasn’t actually for her when I did some research and saw it was a bunch of guys in the Toronto area. I found the person they were writing and did a Facebook search. Found her there and wrote her that she had used .com instead of .ca for her gmail and my gf was getting all her messages. Then I apologized for the fact that the guys writing her were all pretty scary. She wrote back, somewhat mortified. She turned out to be super cute and cool and we’re now Facebook friends, which totally screws with people’s heads since my actual gf isn’t on Facebook. Should I ever break up with my gf, I could have a new one in Canada with the exact same name.

@DrWorm I have a “clean” name on gmail, but I’ve never (as far as I know) gotten mail intended for someone else because my addy doesn’t look like a name. I have gotten spam from someone using my real name as a gmail address, which is a little unsettling. I don’t like having my name appropriated for spam, but since I didn’t claim that addy when I could have …

@DrWorm @rockblossom Thank you for this. My email address, that I’ve been using for ten-to-fifteen years now is longish, but relatively unique with no numbers. I never thought to reserve one with my name though. I just checked and it’s still available, so even though I’ll never use it, no one else can create one with just my name.

@DrWorm Yeah, same here, except it’s a nickname that I received in jr. high, which is just a corruption of my legal first name. (Hint: it’s the same as my name here.) What my jr. high friends didn’t know is that this name is VERY common in Brazil and Spain. How common, you might ask? Well, let’s just say that I ended up with a porn star pal in Madrid because she uses the same name. Oh, the misdirected emails that lead up to my correspondence with the lovely adult actor were FASCINATING.

@ruouttaurmind - I do not see that ANYWHERE in my gmail account.

@aetris Click on “Settings” - it’s the little flower/cog wheel on the upper right.

@rockblossom :

@aetris @rockblossom So far, I have found the new gmail option on only one of my email addys. Needless to say, I’m in no hurry to try it.

@ruouttaurmind

In order to activate the new interface, I would have to bother to boot a laptop. Or to un-mothball a desktop.

Meh.

@f00l I don’t think the webmail interface selection affects mobile app appearance. At least it didn’t make any difference on my phone or tablet.

@ruouttaurmind and yahoo…

@sammydog01 well it does have a feature that allows you to make your email vanish out of someone else’s inbox… some might find that useful if they get into a fight and then want to retract their fighting. I’d suspect this will then make it harder to prove bullying, sexual harassment if people aren’t aware to screenshot any gmail email they want to keep forever.

@Kidsandliz @sammydog01 In the Outlook world, it only works if the person hasn’t read it… Also, I don’t really see how you would have control over the wide variety of email providers the recipient may have. There has been an option to “undo” a sent email within a number of seconds after you click send, but that really just delays sending it until that time expires unless you clicked to undo.

@medz @sammydog01 No I read something in a reasonably reputable source that gmail claims you can pull it back at several different points in time, all of them longer than seconds - they claim weeks. And no that wasn’t published on April 1st either.

@Kidsandliz @medz @sammydog01 For a few years now there’s been an option to turn on ‘Undo Send’ which would let you choose a short time period to recall sent messages (like 30 seconds). The new update has a feature called Confidential Mail which will allow you to set an expiration for when it can be retrieved. The recipient isn’t sent the actual email, just a link to see it. If they don’t open it, it will expire. It supposedly also prevents them from downloading or copying the email, though I’m not sure if they could prevent a simply screenshot.

@cinoclav @medz @sammydog01 Ok so that is what I read (well skimmed). Screen shots and cameras… for now beyond g-mail’s reach LOL

@Kidsandliz That’s because the e-mail isn’t really “in” their inbox. What they get is actually an access code for the e-mail that is sitting somewhere in Google’s cloud, even if it looks (to them) like a normal message. You can set an expiration time for access or “pull” access when you want, which “disappears” the message by invalidating the access code. You can also set is so that a message cannot be forwarded. Of course, as soon as recipients figure this out, they can just highlight and copy the content of the message and save it where they want, and you can’t (as far as I know) prevent that. Which makes it kind of pointless. The new Gmail is indeed more cluttered, and stuff I can now get to with one or two moves/clicks is harder to find and more complicated to access. There’s also a “snooze” function that some might find useful, but I don’t. Overall, I’m not a fan and I’d much prefer to keep the setup I have now.

@cinoclav @Kidsandliz @sammydog01 Yup. If the human eye can see it, there were always be a way for someone to copy it. You might be able to disable copying, saving, and printing within the application it’s displayed in, but you would have to be very clever and tricky to find a way to prevent screen shots/clippings. And if all else fails, they will just photograph the screen.

@medz Heh. I’ve done that with a digital camera to show someone how something appeared on my screen when a “screenshot” didn’t work right. I don’t see any way to prevent that. If it is visible on the screen, it can be photographed, even if there is something preventing the highlight/copy.

@rockblossom

The snooze is like what Inbox has from what I’ve read.

@cinoclav seems about the same, but seems more white…I don’t like all the white space even in compact mode. Maybe it’s just the icons are lighter…

@medz You can always go into settings and change the themes. I chose the ‘dusk’ background, it works to kill off the extra white space.

@medz Luckily it keeps with prior themes, so mine is black and purple. I like the way the new version looks, but I haven’t delved into its functionality yet.

@Barney

Good thing I’m a penguin.

I don’t use Gmail. I use Inbox.

@ekw

That’s why this was made to make the experience more pleasant:

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