Gmail: Please Bold the Hidden Labels Button when there are Unread Messages
I love Gmail. It does everything I could possibly want an email client (web or desktop) to do. All of my non-junk email accounts are Gmail or are forwarded to Gmail accounts. That said, occasionally something occurs to me that would make my Gmail experience a little bit better. Sometimes these crop up as Labs features, which I think is great, and is part of why I enjoy using Gmail so much.
What if this were bold?
There was a fairly recent change to Gmail, where infrequently used labels could be hidden. It lets you keep your important labels in the left sidebar, and if you have 10 more hidden labels you click a little button that says “10 more” to show a menu with all of these labels. Chats, Sent Mail, Drafts, Starred, All Mail, Spam, and Trash also behave like normal labels for this purpose. This is a nice feature, in my opinion. I usually don’t care about how many spam messages I have, so I can tuck it away from my normal view. More importantly, I use a lot of filters (50 or 60) to organize incoming mail under labels (I have 32 at the moment), but most of these only occasionally receive mail and it’s nice to have them hidden too.
When a label has unread messages in, it turns bold. For me, this used to mean that to see if I had any new mail, I looked both at the top of the inbox and scanned the labels for a bold one. Now, to see if any of my hidden labels have new messages, I have to click the button to show these labels. The fix, in my opinion, is to turn the “25 more” text bold when hidden labels have unread messages (see picture). I know it’s small, but this would save compulsive email checkers like myself a fair amount of annoyance. (Yes, I’m aware that I can just move all my labels out of this menu, but I like this feature too much to stop using it because of this.)
A small caveat here is that if you move the Spam label into this menu, you will always have unread messages (unless you don’t get spam, or mark it as read). Spam could be ignored for the purposes of bolding the button, but this might be considered unexpected behavior. Regardless, I’m sure the smart people on the Gmail team could figure something out.
I couldn’t find anyone else talking about this. This may be due to poor Googling on my part, or perhaps nobody else really cares. Hopefully other people have thought about it and we can get the attention of somebody at Google.
Edit: I found another person’s idea for a solution to this problem here.
No comments yet.