J.H. Chabran

I went back to GMail. Colored labels, they are clearly the killer feature. What’s funny is I didn’t know that I would miss them so hard. It’s basically something that screw up the whole color coherence in your page, but so useful.

These colors allow me to visualize and memorize with ease what I received today, and keep it in mind during the whole day.
I got a pretty good visual memory, providing it colors to glue ideas to is just the best way to fix them in my mind. When my associates and I discuss about a subject, I immediately remember the concerned mail thread, because we’re talking about a “blue” or “green” subject and I can filter in my mind according to it.

Sure there are mailboxes too in Mail.app, but it’s not enough, it’s still different mailboxes and remembering a set of numbers is clearly not efficient as remembering a succession of colors.

Here, at my own little company, we use emails for everything, tasks, notes and even reports. All of these can be solved by using different software but it feels way too much when you’re only three people working. Moreover, the killer feature is simply the search function, which let us search in “everything” we’ve done to hunt down informations, people to talk to, clients, technology. Labels on the results list are like sugar, permitting to visually understand in fraction of second to what this thread belongs to.

The bad part is .. Mail.app felt perfect. Hotkeys are all already in your mind because they are shared by all OSX applications, it’s fast, it’s clean and well integrated … but it lack the killer feature : colored label.

The good part is I finally know what really glue me to GMail so hard. I may have already known this one, but after using it daily during three years, it tends to blur itself.