Let us start by saying that we like Google Apps, it has a lot going for it and has been a leader on a number of fronts like its Apps Marketplace, strong authentication and more. But while Google spends an lot of time developing new features and cool tools we would like them to acknowledge a few basic issues with Google Apps and fix them for once and for all. This is our top 5 list of issues that we think Google can, and need to, fix as soon as possible:
1. Not everyone likes Times New Roman like Google does!
When sending unformatted email, GMail decides to format it as Times New Roman anyway, thereby overriding the font settings at the receiving end. So, no matter what the receiver’s email client settings are, your emails are shown in the old fashioned Times New Roman font (leaving your client to wonder why you use email software from ancient history). We would like unformatted email to be really unformatted (fontwise anyway) so the font settings at the receiving end are respected!
The proof. We have sent an email with the SMTP test program Wormly and send it to our email account, it looks like this in Outlook 2010:
When we send a simple message via GMail it looks like this:
And finally, when we change the Outlook default font to Harlow Solid Italic (go to File – Options – Mail – Stationary and Fonts – Composing and reading plain text messages), the Wormly test email looks like this in Outlook 2010:
Whilst the Gmail test email still looks like this:
2. Gmail Signature style and position
Looking at the sample email message again we see that the email signature starts with two hypens (- -). But why this old school look? If we like hyphens surely we can put them in the signature ourselves. Please remove the hyphens!
Also, and maybe even more annoying, when we reply to an email message GMail places the signature at the very bottom of the email, below the original content. Why not place it just below the reply text we have just written so it is easy to see for the receipient, especially in longer emails (the way it is done in most email software, like Outlook)?
These two issues kan be resolved using the unsupported Google Labs feature ‘Signature Tweaks’. But really, should we have to rely on unsupported add-ons (“Some crazy experimental stuff” as Google refers to it…) to get our business email working properly? Let alone that we would have to implement it for each user separately, an admin’s nightmare!
3. Display organisation contacts and group membership
In Google Apps we can use Contact Sharing (Domain Settings – User Settings). This enables users to search for colleagues within the organisation and colleagues will be displayed in auto complete fields:
It is not possible to browse the list of organisation users and groups that are available. Especially for groups this can be an issue as users do not necessarily know how groups are named: management-team, mt or perhaps org-management?
Further more, even when we know the name of the group, we don’t know who is in the group, we can’t expand the group and see it’s members. The only place where we can see the group members at present is via the Calendar application where we can invite a group and see its members:
Our request: include all organisation contacts in the contacts list, preferably in a separate group and make it possible to expand groups to see its members.
4. Deleting email from mobile devices
When deleting email from your iPhone, Android, Windows or Nokia mobile it gets archived in GMail instead of deleted. This means that all the rubbish that you have chucked in the bin isn’t actually gone but still sits in your archive. A pretty serious form of mailbox pollution we would say! We would like Google to at least give us a choice in what the default behaviour should be (via the mailbox settings) or just outright make the setting Delete instead of Archive.
5. Telephone or email support
Okay, this won’t be an overnight change but nevertheless one that Google should really work on in our opinion. Even as a user of the paid Google Apps Premium Google only offers telephone support in case of service outage. For anything less severe you will have to rely on online help and support forums. Also, telephone support contact details are craft-fully tucked away and it is clear that Google really don’t have the appetite (and probably the resources) to deal with any questions directly (via telephone or email).
For a business solution we would like to see timely and personal support even if it has a corresponding price tag, just leave the choice to the customer and we’re pretty sure that a lot of them will pay for support that matches Google’s Premium Apps edition.
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About Ben Stege
Hi Ben!
Thanks a lot for the good article (“5 Google Apps issues we would like Google to fix”). I trully like Gmail, but I really hate Times New Roman as well – I can’t believe they render their “normal” font like that. Have you heard of any solution to this?
I have tested the lab “Default text style”, but it’s to buggy using Chrome and IE. When I press Enter, sometimes no wordwrap is inserted (and sometimes several wordwraps are inserted). The only thing that works with this lab, is to hit Shift + Enter instead – but that is annoying to.
Thanks :-)
Hi Joachim,
I haven’t heard of a solution yet I’m afraid and indeed, it is annoying… Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they will fix it one day.
Cheers!
I feel very frustrated when I have deleted a mail on my mobile device and it come back to hunt me when I eventually go online from a PC. they should fix that fast.