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Friday, February 7, 2014

G-mail New Speak

I am trying to do a better job at bookkeeping. To that end I tried to move all of my messages from Amazon to a separate folder. Gmail has a search function which works fine. It finds and lists all my messages from Amazon. Now I want to move them to a folder, but there does not seem to be any way to do it. I can move the messages to the Inbox, but that is kind of pointless as they are all already in the inbox. If I pull up a single message, I can move it to a different folder, but there are more messages than will fit on one page. (You might think this means I am doing all my shopping at Amazon, but each item ordered seems to generate three of four emails, so ordering half a dozen books could put you over the 25 item page limit.)
    Anyway, I fuss with it for a bit, and then I decide to go to help and file a complaint with the great and powerful Oz, like he'll even listen to the scarecrow, but you have to draw the line somewhere. So I look in help and find this:
Move is nothing more than label + archive (archive just means remove the Inbox label).  So when doing a search, if move-to is not available, use label and then archive.

Also note:  Gmail doesn't have folders.  All your messages are saved in All Mail.  Everything else (Inbox, Starred, Drafts, user-labels, etc) are just "views" into a sub-set of the messages in All Mail.  And since there's only one copy of any message, if you delete it from any label, you're deleting the only copy, so it's gone from all of them.  If you delete a label you remove that "view", but the messages are still in All Mail.

When you Archive a message, the only thing that does is remove the Inbox label from the message.  The original message is still in All Mail along with all your other messages, and you can apply labels to them to make them easier to find later.  Remember that Archive is an action, not a location.
Yes, language is dynamic and ever changing, but God Damn it, we had a perfectly good working definition of "move", "archive" and "label", and now Google just arbitrarily changes the meaning of words? Assholes.

1 comment:

Ole Phat Stu said...

The word you are looking for is
floccipaucinihilipilification ;-)