Gmail

Using filters and labels has made GMail my tool of choice for productivity, but I'm finding it a pain to have to create multiple filters to add multiple labels or to forward emails to multiple recipients.

While I can set up a mailing list in my Google Apps management console that lets me get around the multiple email address limitation, I don't have any other workaround for assigning multiple labels.

[ + Add another Label ] would be a great button to see!

I know that there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to have this and this and this but maybe there's a chance you read this and discuss one or more of my suggestions one day.

Number One
Account Merge: I've been one of the first Gmail customers and have been - most of the time - happy with Gmail. After finding out that (probably not that many) people's accounts have been hacked and Google didn't feel responsible, I thought about the identity problem. As I signed up there was no real obligation to fill out my profile. For the Google support it would be probably impossible to find out that I am the "owner" of the account, let's say demo@gmail.com, when someone hacked my account. I think that is the bad side of being just an "anonymous" user id.

As you opened Google Apps to the audience I immediately switched to Google Apps with my own domain. I have several domain names, by the way. I felt more secure - if someone hacks my account, I could switch MX records and could still use my mail address. That is the good thing, the bad thing is that I would want to merge my Gmail account demo@gmail.com with my demo@domain.com account. I know there is a possibility to set up aliases or even forward / fetch mails from one account to another.

Nice solution, but it's not a smart solution for me. I would prefer to have ONE account, let's say demo@gmail.com and then a SUB account demo@domain.com. When I write mails from demo@domain.com I don't want anyone to see my @gmail.com address. Also, when I chat with someone I want to choose which ID I will use. I don't want to use demo@domain.com everytime. A merge would also be great because of calendar integration, Docs intregation, etc. Too difficult with two accounts. And then I have a different Google Adsense account (demo@yahoo.com). Google customer support told me merge with another Google account. Because I have several domains and didn't want to use aliases (which are just mail aliases) I had to create more and more Google Apps accounts. All together I maybe have ten accounts. No, really, it's too much. You just HAVE to provide a possibility to merge accounts.

Number Two
Colors: As I said, I like Gmail, but it's a pain in the a... to look at the colors. Please, please, provide a simple possibility to change the colors. No themes. I don't need more graphics. I switched from Yahoo and HoTMaiL to Gmail because Gmail was plain simple, but please provide a possibility to change the color from a (in my opinion) terrible looking green/blue to other colors. By the way, I prefer simple grey! Bright and darker grey.

Number Three
Chat intregation: AIM support is already great, but not that many people use AIM anymore (unfortunately!), MSN and Yahoo are more interesting.

Number Four
Provide an address book: I know you have a contact manager, but it's not an address book. I know it's so much IN to have social networking integration everywhere, in a year or two probably people even share their mailboxes on the internet lol, but there some users who don't need all that. It should be optional. An address book should be an address book. I want to put MY contacts in the address book, not the ones that Google thinks are important for me. An address book for ME is Yahoo's address book. That is a real address book. I can store all my informations about someone and another important thing: I can access the address book very easy without opening my mails. http://addressbook.xxxxx.com that's it.

Number Six
Provide better Opera support: I cannot understand why you two companies can't work together to develop an Opera compatible version that looks like the one when you open Internet Explorer or Firefox. I've been a long time Opera user, had to switch to Firefox (which I just hate because it's even in the RC3 slower as Opera 5 years ago) just to be able to use Gmail. There are not hundreds of millions of Opera users, I understand that well, but even for the hundreds of thousands of people there should be a solution. Right now you force them to switch to IE or FF or to use different mail services.

Thanks for your time.