Today, they rolled out the new look for GMail (at least I got my first look today). The new look is a mixed bag. I generally find it less readable. The layout of messages is much harder for me to navigate. I find it harder to see what’s going on in a message thread, because in the past I had collapsed versions of all messages in the top of the screen and I could expand and contract them as I wished. I still haven’t figured out what the organizational principle is for the new layout and, from a usability point of view, any interface that you can’t figure out after an hour is rather a usability failure.

But, just after firing off an email to Google to explain why I found their new interface so difficult to navigate, I was poking around the settings and realized that GMail Offline is finally back and now inlcudes offline access to Calendar and Documents! It is currently only integrated with Chrome as a sort of standalone app (download for GMail or Calendar and Google Docs).

This is what the GMail offline app looks like:

GMail Offline Interface

I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but you can open the troubleshooting page by going to Settings -> Offline and scrolling down to the link for the Troubleshooting Page.

On my page, I noticed several errors for Failed to get blob down at the bottom of the page under “Recent Errors”.

A BLOB, of course, is a Binary Large Object. I realized at that point that I had unsynchronized messages with images attached (that is to say with BLOBs attached).

I tried moving these to Drafts, but that still didn’t work, so I copied and pasted the contents into a text editor for safe keeping, deleted the messages, cleared the browser cache, closed the browser, reopened, and reloaded GMail.

Success!

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that can cause this, but I didn’t find any good information on this on Google Groups or with a quick search, so hopefully this will help someone or at least give some directions to look in.

What I Do Now (2011)

Before I tell you how to find unlabelled email, I have to say that I eventually just gave up. It was too much of a hassle to keep my shortcut updated as I changed labels. What I do now is try to be diligent about adding important items to my filters. If it’s a bill or an essential business email, I filter it to add a label that makes sense. So everything sent to the email address for my vacation rental in Yosemite gets copied and forwarded to my GMail account. It also gets a label “Rental”. When I’m in a hurry and think I have to catch up on rental business, I just view email with the Rental label. Once it’s processed, it goes into one of the nested labels under Rental (Awaiting Reply, Booked, Non-Customer, Former Customer, Admin). That makes a sort of mini inbox for the rental that I can deal with effectively, without getting sidetracked by notifications from Facebook. Then when I need to find something, I just use search. Yes, I have been assimilated by the Gorg!

Shortcut for Finding Unlabelled Emails

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but oh so cumbersome. You have to do a negative search for every label you use. That is, you look for messages not labelled Labe1 and not labelled Label2 and so on. There’s no way around this.

If you do this more than once, typing in all your labels in the arcane syntax Gmail uses gets old. So what I’ve done is simply create a shortcut, which you can do quite easily and it works up until you add a new label, but then it’s just a simple matter of editing the bookmark.

So first, you have a full syntax and a compact syntax and, as far as I can tell, the compact syntax does not work with multi-word labels. So if you have Gmail labels with spaces in them, you have to use the full syntax and substitute hyphens for spaces.

So let’s say you have the following labels:

1. Label1
2. Label2
3. Label Three
4. Label Four

First, we want to exclude all messages that have those labels. To exclude a labeled message from your search, you use the -label: operator.

For the single-word labels, we’ll use the short syntax. This allows you to group terms within curly braces without repeating the “-label:” qualifier. So it looks like this in your Gmail search box

-label:{Label1 Label2}

Simple as that. Now for the multi-word labels, in theory as I read the instructions, I merely need to add quotes around the terms, and they should work within the curly braces. Not so for me. If you create a filter and look at the test search, that’s not how it does it either. So based on that, what I found worked for Label Three and Label Four was:

-label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

So the entire search, with both single-word labels and multi-word labels, looks like this

-label:{Label1 Label2} -label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

Now, that will create a URL that looks like this

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/-label%3A%7BLabel1+Label2%7D+-label%3ALabel-Three+-label%3ALabel-Four

Now you can save this as a bookmark or shortcut and instantly access your unlabeled Gmail messages. Sometimes Gmail will add a zx parameter to your URL that looks like zx=afeoasdxou3swf that is just a random string so that if your ISP is caching data, it will see this as a unique URL and won’t give you cached data for Gmail. Since this effectively creates a single-use URL, if that appears in your URL when you do your search, you should edit it out before saving the bookmark.

Note that if a message has two labels and you are only excluding one of those, the message will still show up in your search. So if you have something labeled Label1 and Label5, and you use the search above, it will still show up in your results.

Also, sometimes a conversation that is labeled shows up unless you relabel the entire conversation, because one message is unlabeled or is still in the Inbox or whatever. If you select the whole conversation in the list view and label it, that takes care of that issue.

Labelling Your Backlog

As per Karen’s suggestion below (see comments), if you’re trying to identify your unlabelled email just once and go label your back log, then you can view All, apply a label like “NoLabel” to it (or move them all to the Inbox as Karen suggests, but my Inbox is always overfull to start with and it stresses me out to much to put processed mail back in the Inbox… makes me feel like I’m making negative progress!).

Now go into ever other label folder, select all and remove the “NoLabel” label. Now if you go to the NoLabel folder, you have all your unlabelled email. If you’re going to do this on any kind of regular basis, though, you’ll want a bookmark as described above, otherwise this will be pretty time-consuming.

Dealing with Child Labels and Labels with Special Characters

James asks, what happens if you have special characters like underscores or slashes in your Gmail labels? If you are using the Gmail sublabel feature, you will automatically have slashes, because Gmail separates parent and child labels with slashes (look at Gmail in the Basic HTML mode and you can readily see this). First off, most special characters are just entered as such. Slashes must be entered as hyphens.

So let’s say you have the following setup:

• Main
  • test1
    • test2
  • test3/test4
  • test*,:-test-./test

In that case, your search syntax will be, respectively

• -label:main
• -label:main-test1-test2
• -label:main-test3-test4
• -label:main-test*,:-test-.-test

Note that a label called “test3/test4″ which is a single label, behaves exactly the same as test2 which is a child label of test1. And for anything except slashes and spaces, which are both replaced by hyphens, you just use the character as it appears in the label. That’s even true for the colon, even though it’s part of the search syntax.

• Doesn't sync with Yahoo! mail, contacts or calendar as advertised. According to their response to my bug report, this is because of anti-DOS (denial of service) measures. So in other words, Yahoo! mail servers interpret a request to synch on the part of Zimbra as a DOS attack. Great.Update: the Zimbra team has supposedly addressed this problem in response to my bug report and this is slated to be fixed in version 1.0. If this is indicative of how they work, the final true release of Zimbra could indeed rock.
• Then apparently Google went and changed their Contacts API right after Zimbra RC1 was cut, so that doesn't seem to work either.
• While on the subject of gmail, Google lets me use any "send" address so I can use gmail as a client for any account, but I can't take advantage of this with Zimbra via my gmail account, so it's pretty much useless of sending from my gmail account too. Granted, that's sort of a weird request on my part and I don't think there's anything Zimbra or any client can do about it. I could explain why I want to do this, but you probably don't care.
• And then there's the minor little problem that I could neither start nor shut down Zimbra. So I was resigned to uninstall and reinstall. Except that I couldn't do that either. Getting it off my computer is turning into quite a hassle in and of itself. If there's one thing I won't forgive in an application, it is poor uninstall functionality. If you do nothing else, make sure your application uninstalls gracefully. I can forgive everything else because if you don't mess up my system, I have nothing to risk by trying you again at version 2. If you do mess up my system and require booting into safe mode, editing the registry and crap like that, I'm not likely to try your version 2.

So in short, I've changed my review rating from "Give it a try" to "Stay far away."

Back before all that, my review read like this:]

Finally, Zimbra Desktop has arrived at Release Candidate status and features I was missing in the Beta version have been added as promised. Check out the Zimbra blog category for Zimbra Desktop for lots of other details. It now provides everything I want and includes for free features I would have been willing to pay for. For me, this is a Thunderbird killer. It could even be an Outlook killer, but since most people get Outlook for “free” (that is to say bundled with Office), I’m not sure there will be any inroads there. Anyway, some key Zimbra features:

• “Email, contacts, calendar, and documents all in one application.” That’s not something I’ve traditionally liked, but this isn’t too bad.
• “Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts and calendars.” This is huge. Try synchronization of contacts and email. Something I’ve been seeking for a while – all my contacts in a central repository that gets synched with other copies. Sort of like CVS or Subversion for contacts.
• “Read email from any POP or IMAP email account including AOL, Hotmail or business email.” I don’t care about AOL or Hotmail, but excellent IMAP support for my main work account is key.
• “Works on Windows, Apple, or Linux desktop computers.” Windows only here, but partly because of legacy apps like Photoshop. The more apps I have that work on multiple platforms, the freer I’ll be in the end.
• “No limit to the size of your email storage.” Whatever. GMail and Yahoo with their GBs and GBs of storage are close enough to no limit for me.
• It works online and offline. Bold on this one. This is huge. I often have no connection or a dialup connection. I want my address book synched with an online repository, but I want to have it available when I’m offline.
• Multiple TODO lists. I love my Abstract Spoon ToDo list application (I need to write about that one too), so I doubt I’ll use the Zimbra feature, but it’s not bad. To replace the AS Todo list, it would need labels, priorities, due dates, hierarchy and all that. But for litttle “Call mom” type of tasks, it’s not bad.

[Update - some stuff in here is wrong - seem my comments]
I must say there are a few interface shortcomings that will hopefully be added/fixed for version 1.1 or 2. Above all, the address book allows only sorting by last name (I prefer first name sort) and you can’t see all addresses in one list (you see the As, the Bs the Cs etc). More importantly for some, it effectively runs as a sort of daemon in the background and then has a front end that launches on demand. Currently, it shares most of the code of the full Zimbra server, which means that it eats up memory, as in the daemon takes up 100MB when it’s just sitting there checking to see if you have any new mail. You are effectively running a server. If your computer is at all short on memory, this is not for you. The official word from Yahoo! is that they will first make Zimbra Desktop feature complete and then work on optimizing the runtimes. Personally, I think this is good practice — prototype first, then scale/optimize later. You could consider this a prototype, but damn inefficient. For me, my machine has plenty of memory and I would rather have an email client I don’t hate than an extra 100MB of memory, but that will depend a lot on your machine (I currently have Photoshop, Firefox, Word, Canon Scangear, Skype, iTunes, WAMP Server, Workrave, Abstract Spoon ToDo List and more running without problems, so Zimbra’s resource usage doesn’t bother me a lot).

I’m not sure yet how well address book synch works and whether or not it’s true two-way sync. For me the beta client was the most stable client I’ve had since Eudora and the Release Candidate seems solid too.

Unlike Thunderbird, you really can manage a Gmail account with Zimbra. For example, if I “move” a message to a Label in Zimbra (drag the message to a label), it automatically labels the message and archives it, so it takes it out of your inbox. At least for my part, that’s how I would like a desktop client to work with Gmail. I’m still new to Zimbra, but in my quest of a solution that does not crash, it’s running neck and neck with GMail offline. I’ve never cared for GMail, but with Gears it’s fast and that was my main complaint before. The main issue with GMail offline, is that you don’t have access to your address book. Since I’m offline a lot and use the address book for phone numbers and such, that’s a huge downside to Gmail Offline. I know they’ll probably have it within a year, but Zimbra has it now.

For anyone still with me, here’s a run down of what I’ve tried and why I don’t like them:

• Lately I’ve been experimenting with GMail offline, but it has some issues. Most significantly, you don’t have access to your address book when you’re offline. As I just mentioned, that’s a big negative for me. Also, there are interface issues. I want to delete a message and then immediately see the next one, not be taken back to the damn message list every time. I hate this. I have found a way to sort of delete and go next in GMail, but it takes a lot more than the one click that it should. Also, there’s no built-in way to see unlabeled emails. I built a custom search and shortcut to show unlabeled Gmail messages in one click but this should be built in.
• Thunderbird. I’ve been a Thunderbird user since version 0.4 or so and for me it has just gotten more and more unstable. I finally gave up on Thunderbird 2 crashing constantly and went to Shredder, the beta of Thunderbird 3, but that crashes at least as often. You can get some rudimentary synchronization between Gmail and yout Thunderbird contacts using Zindus, but it kept overwriting my data in funny ways and I lost a fair bit of stuff in my address book. Also, since Thunderbird and Gmail contacts use quite a different format (address is all one field in Gmail whereas it’s broken out into street, city, state, etc in Thunderbird. So that causes certain undesired effects. This was a “lesser of all evils” solution, but I’ve never really liked it.
• Outlook Express used to come with Windows. It set all-time standard for instability, so no go there, plus it’s now horribly outdated. No synchronization either.
• Windows Live Desktop Mail Client comes with Vista and it was never to my liking, also had funny stability issues and didn’t have synchronization with an online address book. Also, I just never really liked the interface.
• Outlook had no real advantages over Outlook Express if you don’t want calendaring and, though I do, I hate the way Outlook does reminders. Also, unless you pony up for an Exchange account, no synch between computers or online accounts. More annoyance than I could handle. Also, it’s rather bloated.
• PocoMail. A friend swears by this, but no or inadequate IMAP support. So scratch that.
• Zimbra Beta 1. Promising, but didn’t solve the synchronization problem and I didn’t like the interface that much.

I must say, it pains me to see the issues that Yahoo! is having, because I think they have some great products like Zimbra and I just hope that if Yahoo! gets sold, the buyer does good things with the best of Yahoo!

Anyway, if you feel like your current email client just isn’t doing it for you, Zimbra is worth a look.

I would say the thing that drives me nuts the most about Gmail, is the fact that every time you delete a message, you’re kicked back out to the message list. Google, taking a page from Microsoft, has decided to do your thinking for you and take this option off the table because you really shouldn’t delete emails. But if I know I will never want that message again, I delete it. And am stuck back out at the message list. This, more than anything has stopped me from adopting Gmail.

It turns out there is a ‘Delete’ and go to next conversation Greasemonkey script that will do just what I’m looking for, but recent Gmail upgrades broke that script. So out of luck again. [Update, June 22, 2009: this script has been fixed. Check it out.]

Over at JimsTips.com, Jim suggests using Gmail Keyboard shortcuts (Gmail Help article) deleting with the # key, which does kick you back to the message list and then using the ‘k’ key to move to the next message and the ‘o’ or <enter> key to open the message. The thing I dislike about that is that it is three page loads when it should be two (in other words, why do I have to see that damn message list?).

So my similarly kludgey, but somewhat more elegant solution (or maybe not) is to:

• Turn on keyboard shortcuts (in Settings -> General).
• Create a label named ‘Delete’ (or ‘aaDelete’ if you want to be sure it is at the top of your label list).
• When reading a message, type ‘l’ (that’s a lower-case L) to bring up the label list.
• Hit the downarrow key once to select my top aaDelete label at the top of my list
• Hit the ‘k’ key to move to the next message.
• When I’m all done, I can view the messages deleted aaDelete and select and delete them all.

Yeah, stupid, crappy, cumbersome way to do it. I know. Tell Google.

Now if only they would come up with a proper way to view all unlabeled messages, but my solution to that is reasonably workable, if a bit cumbersome.