The desktop Outlook client still has a lot of features that the Outlook (Office365) web client still doesn't have. Some of those features are critical to handling large volumes of mail.
There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows
"X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course.
Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1].
So essentially if data is indexed your able to.
I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this.
So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be
1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data.
2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest.
Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature.
I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.
What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.
Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.
Right. Well, now I'm sad because I realized that indeed I had this problem occasionally; the way GMail implements search I don't exactly even trust them that the first mail they show me is actually the first mail, and not search bugging out. I guess I forgot about that because I very rarely need to do such a search.
You also reminded me of another e-mail annoyance - people sending PGP signatures in attachments make it nigh-impossible to search for actual attachments, as every conversation with those senders looks like it has one.
When I deleted my gmail accounts in 2013 (post Snowden leaks) they still didn't have partial word search. I had to connect to Gmail using Thunderbird and Google's terrible IMAP implementation just to search for parts of words .. in 2013 .. from the e-mail provider that's a search company. O_o
- it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place
- it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far
I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain.
Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!