Losing the fixed-width font is annoying to me. I frequently have code or logs in emails, and these are horrible to read in a variable width font because columns don't align, and ^^^ indicators don't line up. I'm curious why this was abandoned.

Moreover, fixed-width font was probably a pretty easy lab feature to write, and was already written. The other dropped features were also already written. Why then, prune the list of lab features? Was the list of features getting too long and no one wanted to put in the effort of categorizing them? Or was this some market-droid idiot's idea of justifying their existence? (I was (also) a fan of fixed-width...) Alternately, is it possible that there is a front end 'overhaul' coming down the pipes, and the abandoned lab features weren't worth updating?

Maintaining stuff most people don't use is an unnecessary headache. Yes it works today but what if some future gmail feature breaks it?

I'm pretty sure even Labs go through some sort of QA process.

Pruning features is as essential to software quality as adding new ones.

Because dropping features, especially those that the majority don't use, aren't polished enough (UI or stability/quality) or causes too many support issues is a good way to keep a product nice and lean. Not that I know why they dropped it.

I enabled this feature for a similar purpose (exception reports from running apps).

However, even with fixed-width available, I almost always go after the "show original" feature* instead. I find that having the message isolated in a separate tab altogether makes it much easier to read.

* "Show original" is under the drop-down menu for the message itself.

When they came out with themes I went through every theme they had until I found one with a fixed width font.

Admittedly everyone laughs at the terminal theme. But it does the trick. And the green on black is surprisingly comfortable to read.

It should be reasonably easy to make a custom stylesheet for this feature.

One already exists for the Firefox plugins Stylish/Greasemonkey. It should be trivial to adapt for other browsers that allow custom stylesheets.

http://userstyles.org/styles/22246

Gmail is really interesting. I'm a big free-software fan - I really dislike running non-free stuff on my own computer. Not so much for RMS reasons, but just because I like the freedom to hack on stuff as I see fit, and partly just to support open source (it has given me so much over the years). I've never had that hangup about online services though, even though logically they're not really that different. And indeed, I switched to Gmail several years ago because their anti-spam was (and still is, I think) way better than what I was able to cobble together with Linux.

However, every now and then I'm reminded that in giving up some freedom, you pay a price. I would love to try and hack in a feature to Gmail that makes it permanently associate certain From email adddresses with people. For instance, if I write someone and set the From to @dedasys.com, I want future email with that person to always use that address. If I use the @apache.org address, then that should be used in the future, unless I change it. I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.

> I can't implement this, though, as far as I know.

I understand your point, and I know you aren't arguing against Google, but... supposing you were able to... would you? I'd bet at least 999 out of 1,000 users of any given open client- Thunderbird for example- would not invest the effort, or could not due to lack of skill. And this is with Thunderbird- GMail's penetration into markets with unskilled non hacker types is drastically greater.

Ironically, I guess you could say my argument is that like the features they are phasing out- not enough people would truly use it!

If you really wanted to, there might be that kind of ability in gears. Perhaps low level, or perhaps just through manipulating the UI- a bit of a macro.

Yes, it's likely I would if it weren't too difficult.

I implemented the "Oops, do you want to send an attachment" feature in mutt years ago, and sent in the patch, which, sadly, was not accepted.

Most people don't hack on stuff - no argument there. But some of us do, and I think that we occasionally make the world a better place.

The more power to ya then :)

No disagreement here. hackers have made my world a much better place many times.

R.I.P. Location in Signature. Was an interesting feature for those that traveled a lot (and thus not require us to explain any long delays in email reply time). Although I did forget about it from time to time. Boy did she not like seeing "Sent from Las Vegas, NV, United States" in my sig..

I never managed to get it to actually say where I was - it would frequently decide I was in London or some other random place hundreds of miles away where (presumably) my ISP had a presence. On one particularly memorable occasion, I got an email reply saying "why are you in Southend-on-Sea? We're supposed to be meeting in Manchester at 2pm". I quickly turned it off after that - the lack of accuracy made it more of a problem than a useful feature.

No wonder fixed-width font goes away due to not being used. Why did they have to insist on setting the message's font to "Courier New, Courier, fixed" instead of just fixed?

Courier is even worse than the proportional standard. Why not respect the setting that was defined in the browser?

Thanks, Google, for continuing to provide useful features in Labs.

Noticed my 'go to label' shortcut got updated. I like the new interface much more than what it used to be, but am not a fan of the scroll area jumping around.

The 'gl' (go label) shortcut used to display an auto-complete text box in the center of your gmail window to enter a label, now 'gl' jumps to the search box and automatically prepends 'label:' to the query. It makes much more sense to do it in the search box, but doesn't feel as fluid as the old one.

Noooooo, fixed width font was the best!

Anybody else sad to see muzzle go? I think rolling over contacts in the gchat pane in order to see their status messages is perfect. Now I will only be able to see half as many contact names...

yea I really liked muzzle. It's kinda annoying not having it.

I can't believe they're retiring "random signature" I so thought about using it. I could have had a different funny quote in my signature for every email I sent.