Archiving Shortcut to the Rescue!

You can see the way the engineers over at Google’s Gmail work and have their free time by the amount and the magnitude of updates they keep rolling out. Nothing from them for about two or three weeks (including the Christmas holidays) and after that they shower us with services, one after another.

Ever thought that a single letter could mean the world of difference between happy and unhappy? I’m not thinking about one of the three magical words ("I Love You" are the ones I’m referring to, just to be on the safe side, where if the "I" is missing you have a lot of drama before you and a serious two-hour talk about why the two of you aren’t talking the way you were before). Leaving all that aside, imagine your frustration of having to pay attention for a second time to something you had already dealt with before. Annoying.

That’s why the Engineering Manager of Gmail announced today on the Official Gmail Blog that when he was faced with the same problem and most of all, when it was set before his eyes by the product he was nursing, he just couldn’t take it and decided that something had be done.

Archiving used to be fairly easy with the email service provided by Google, the "y" shortcut did its job as intended and the skies were blue. Clouds started forming when the latest update was being prepared and the whole situation turned into a massive lightning storm when it was released: the labels ruined it all. The way "y" worked was that technically it removed the conversation from the current view. Before labels, that view was only the inbox, but once they were introduced, pressing the key would only remove the label while not archiving the conversation, giving users some extra work to do.

As of today, the situation has changed. A new "e" shortcut has been set in place, covering for its negligent sis: tapping "e" will now archive the message no matter what, no more unnecessary mouse movements and, foremost, salvation for those who are heavy emailers, dealing with more than a couple of hundred messages a day that are sorted by origin and labeled as such.

Linking to a popular Cartoon Network show, I could say that this is "¡Super E al rescate!"


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