This is kind of a silly argument to make. How does an end user have any way to know whether a particular behavior is a bug or intentional when the behavior is actively bad?
Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it?
Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of.
I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug!
A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way.
The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.
This combination of behaviors has long been the key to me hating gmail. I can't begin to estimate the number of messages I've missed because of how gmail handles threads.
Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it?
Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of.
I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug!
A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way.
The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.