At work, I'm often called upon to serve as the guru for all things Google Apps. The fact is sometimes lost that (a) working on the innards of something and (b) being the expert at all its glorious features are two quite distinct propositions.
It doesn't help that I don't just dismiss some of these questions, perhaps out of fear of ridicule ("Hey, shouldn't you just ... know that? I mean, weren't you paying attention?")
But then he raised the stakes and asked if there's a way to search unread mail with a single click. That took me a good part of the afternoon, because the GreaseMonkey scripts I found on the net were all old or non-functional in some way.
So I created a simple one. Its adds a "Search Unread" button to your GMail UI. You need GreaseMonkey to use it. So...
- Install GreaseMonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
- Install my script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33056
Meanwhile, with Google Apps, I do reserve a few undocumented or otherwise not-so-well-known tricks to distract my young Skywalkers when next I'm cornered and stumped.
And now that I'm all wound up, if you've got a great need for some GreaseMonkey UI enhancement for Google Apps, let me know.
081012 Update: The GMail UI changes its element IDs from time to time. I've posted a fix to follow the latest change.
100225 Update: I've posted a more robust version.
5 comments:
If you don't want to install greasemonkey, don't use firefox or don't want to worry about it breaking when Gmail is changed, here's another way but it takes an extra click or two.
Add the quick links lab (Settings -> Labs, scroll down to Quick Links and enable it), then in the search type "is:unread" then once the page loads save it as a quick link. Then to search unread mail you just click that quick link, then add whatever you want to search for to the search box. The same effect as if you typed "is:unread blah blah" but you don't have to type the is unread part every time.
Also if you often search for something more specific than just unread [(ie "is:unread from:(mom OR dad)"] you can make a quick link to that as well.
Cool, thanks, mynameismolotov! That would work for a great many users.
Actually I was aware of the Labs and Quick Link features in GMail (I was with the GMail team at Google) (*). However that is not yet available for Google-Apps-For-Your-Domain users, and that was the original use case I was being asked to help with.
Besides, it's cooler to do hack up a GreaseMonkey script!
-----
(*) Of course, I'm learning new things about GMail from how other people use it all the time---see my original comment :-)
Oh you used to work for Google? That's really sweet I would love to work there someday their apps and services are always very cutting edge and useful.
I have a question for you not specifically related to this post (which is actually how I came about your blog) but I couldn't find a link to email you so I'll put it here.
I have email from my university account forwarded to my gmail account. I want to label all the emails sent to my university addressed to be labeled, so I made a filter that labels all emails to:me@ohio.edu. However whenever one of my professors emails the class or any email sent to all students, the to: field doesn't have my email address in it because all the receiving students are just bcc. Is there another way to distinguish emails based on which account they're sent to?
Anyway your blogs pretty interesting I enjoyed reading your posts. Thanks for any help you could give me.
Geoff
ps Since this comment is completely unrelated to your article and more of a question you can just delete it if you want.
Hi Geoff, probably the 2 most reliable ways to do what you want are:
1. Use GMail's "plus addressing" support. See , e.g., http://cybernetnews.com/2008/02/19/cybernotes-using-gmail-filters/ and look for "plus addressing".
2. Have GMail's mail fetcher retrieve your ohio.edu account to your gmail.com account, and in the process it will apply whatever label you wish. See, e.g., http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/screenshots-of-gmails-mail-fetcher.html .
Enjoy.
Any chance you could make a Mark as Unread button to go along with the Gmail labs Mark as Read? Seems such a basic item, but they still have not introduced it.
Than you!
Post a Comment