Does anyone else find Gmail really confusing?

glenimp617

glenimp617

glenimp617

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Whatever happened to the good old days where you had an inbox, sent items and deleted items :confused:

I'm confused :D

Gmail is a nightmare to manage.

I wrongly assumed that all incoming email went into my inbox, where google would then label it up based on their algorithms and link to the label folders.

DOH! First mistake made by me then.

This means that in order to do my email housekeeping, not only to I need to tidy up my inbox, but also every folder shown on the right hand side panel :rolleyes: That's gonna take ages!

The algorithms are hit and miss at best. I can't simply go into my promotions folder and delete all, as it contains things like my credit card statement lol

Why can't everything go into my inbox :mad:

Furthermore, the numbers don't add up

All Mail - 1243 < Where's this number coming from?

Inbox - 986
Starred - 0
Important - 300
Chats - 0 (after deleting them all)
Sent Mail - 100
Drafts - 0
Spam - 0
Bin - 4

Social - 0
Promotions - 92
Updates - 843
Forums - 0

also, when I send a hangouts message, it creates an email in the chats folder? there's an email per message! there's thousands of them

considering Google is a web company, the email webpage is dire! You can't even view emails by subject, in fact, you can't even change the display at all!

from Googles help website

[Gmail]/All Mail contains all of your messages in Gmail, including your sent and archived messages. Any messages that you see in your inbox will also appear in the [Gmail]/All Mail folder.
 
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Orcvader said:
At first I wasn't sure about it but after a while it started working pretty well for me. I do agree however that it's annoying that there's no main inbox to show all of them.

You can disable the categories if you want by going here and pressing the "+" next to the tabs: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=Cm#inbox
Click to expand...

Yeah, I did hide them all but then found I was missing emails. I'm really struggling with this. There doesn't seem to be a single folder containing all incoming emails. It's not time efficient to go through all folders, most of which contain the same emails found in other folders, yet not all
 
Go into the settings and turn off the Social and Promotions categories, then all you will have left is your Inbox which will contain everything that isn't getting spam filtered.
 
^ Nope, the numbers still don't add up

However!

I have finally worked out what the problem is.

It seems if at some point you have used an IMAP email client (like the mac i had last year), the numbers get screwed up. This especially happens when deleting mail. If you simply delete an email in the usual way, it removes it from inbox but keeps it in all mail! The trick is to drag the email to the Gmail/Trash folder in the email client.

The moral of the story, is if you are using gmail, stick to the web browser or android app lol

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If you are deleting mail using Apple Mail, it doesn't go to Trash. It is simply removed from the Inbox - which means it remains in All Mail. So you can empty Trash as often as you like, and those messages won't be deleted because you didn't put them in Trash in the first place.

=============

To delete a message using Apple Mail, drag it to the GMail/Trash "folder".

See this reference for how various commands work over IMAP

================================================
 
There you go then, it's Apple causing problems with daft client behaviour :p

If you'd just stuck with the almighty G then all would have been well
 
I made a hotmail account back in the early days, and still use it.
I've tried a few other including gmail. And I too felt like it was confusing.

I like simple.
 
glen8 said:
============

If you are deleting mail using Apple Mail, it doesn't go to Trash. It is simply removed from the Inbox - which means it remains in All Mail. So you can empty Trash as often as you like, and those messages won't be deleted because you didn't put them in Trash in the first place.

=============/QUOTE]

Sounds like its being "archived" (function in Gmail) rather than deleted.
Click to expand...
 
Richie said:
glen8 said:
============

If you are deleting mail using Apple Mail, it doesn't go to Trash. It is simply removed from the Inbox - which means it remains in All Mail. So you can empty Trash as often as you like, and those messages won't be deleted because you didn't put them in Trash in the first place.

=============/QUOTE]

Sounds like its being "archived" (function in Gmail) rather than deleted.
Click to expand...

I did wonder about archives, but I can't for the life of me find them

it seems there are emails in the all mail folder, which aren't anywhere else....nor can I easily identify them (due to the web clients inability to sort by criteria)
Click to expand...
 
I'm gonna give up with this soon

Hidden all the labels, turned chat off, made it as 'normal' as you can, but now whenever I send a hangouts message they are appearing in my inbox!

why on earth do I need a copy of the messages in my emails when they are in hangouts?

:edit: seems google is adamant that all your chat history is stored(duplicated) in gmail

the fix......

1) Under Settings/Filters scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Create a new filter"
2) In the pop up box that appears, enter is:chat under the heading "Has the words".
3) Click "Create filter with this search"
4) Click "Ok" in the warning box that appears
5) Select "Skip the inbox (Archive it)"
6) Select "Delete it"
7) Select "Also apply filter to XX matching conversations."
 
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