Comments on: Does Gmail Suggested Contacts solve the problem?

By: Scott Anger

Scott Anger — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:23:36 +0000

Mark, 2 points; 1) you missed another important feature of “everything google”. It’s a beta product, don’t expect production functionality from it. Even the email portion of gmail isn’t “perfect”. 2) They do know what you want. You want the “perfect” functionality of being able to type a recent contact coupled with the a decent contact manager. You want Outlook’s NK2 file. Doing that in a web application is a little more complicated. Give it time.

By: Joel

Joel — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:53:00 +0000

I personally agree with Tim, for I find Mark’s solution as bad as the contact managing state he complains about, in the way that on both gmail is deciding for you the way your contacts will be managed. I understand he wats to manage them manually, but how about a normal user like Mackenzie’s mom, I agree my mom would rather gmail administer the contacts automatically adding all of them at once.

As Tim suggested letting us choose how the contacts will be managed (manually, automatically or someplace in the middle) seems to me the better way to go for now.

But this is all my opinion. All n all, I truly love the fact that google listens to what their users want =)

By: Taloweb

Taloweb — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:01:52 +0000

GMail is very great, but I HATE Gmail contacts management, at all… I hope Gmail folks will create a clean and useful system to manage contacts, if you can please write about this need!

By: Jorge

Jorge — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:43:10 +0000

Actually, I find this to be the most appropiate solution. Some of the people you send mail to, you’ll definitely want to look up later on. And now you’ll have a clean segmentation between your “official” contacts and the people you’ve only sent mail to in the past.

The other (additional) screen for saving the contact, while sometimes useful, would simply add another step to the process. I like hitting the send button and that’s it, email sent.

Anyways, I respect your opinion and I completely agree on that THIS is the kind of features Gmail should be implementing instead of the crap that’s currently on gmail labs. The gmail labs is a good idea, but the current “features” there SUCK.

By: Samantha

Samantha — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:02:40 +0000

I also hate having to delete the contacts from the chat list on the sidebar. Just because I email a person once doesn’t mean I automatically want them there! Also, it would make more sense if they added the people who actually had gmail. What use is that feature if the email address is from hotmail or a personal domain?

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:17:36 +0000

To be honest, I think that this is a good solution. While, the old system of having every person you ever emailed in one spot was annoying, putting it in a separate place is very convenient. I’ve had times where, I thought I was just going to email someone once, and months later, I need to email them again (I don’t like searching through my emails, I can never remember what they’re about).

However, in my opinion, a better solution would be to keep the “Suggested Contacts”, but have an option in the preferences which let you either:
1: Always Save Contacts (in Suggested Contacts)
2: Never Save Contacts
3: Ask to save Contacts

But, that’s just me.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:13:23 +0000

Ugh. I touted “you don’t even have to figure out how the address book works, it’ll just automatically add everybody you talk to so it can show when you start typing” as a feature to my mom when I switched her to GMail last week. And now they’ve gone and gotten rid of it! Now she’s gonna have to go learn to use the address book and remember to manually add people and bleh…she’s gonna go back to replying to 3-month-old emails (to avoid the address book) again, I just know it! Bring back the automagic address book!

By: Nestor

Nestor — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:53:14 +0000

I don’t think making a sub-folder in the address book solves the issue.
I assume GMAIL doesn’t want to “hit us” with what we already have in Yahoo! or in Hotmail, which is exactly what Mark is suggesting “Let us decide if we want to add the contact, or not”…

They probably want to make a super innovative feature that does the same thing as letting us decide whatever we want to do with the email address we just sent.

By: Jen

Jen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:48:07 +0000

While we’re on it, why can’t they include an option to add a contact more easily? I hate that they only way to add a contact is to create a new contact and manually enter their email address! They should include Add Contact on the little drop down menu you get when you hover on any email address in an email.

For example, a friend emailed a whole list of people including me. I’d like to add everyone to my contact list and create a group so I can use it in the future, without replying to the email now. Very frustrating that I can’t do this.