Ahh well, I guess it had to happen. The blissful honeymoon period is over. Alas, Gmail is not perfect. Or to be more specific, Gmail Contacts is not perfect. Actually, I would go as far as saying it is pretty crappy. If there is one thing I miss in Outlook it is the excellent contact management features.
Today I discovered how inadequate Gmail Contacts is. I created a Group of 16 people – the people who I have asked to help with beta testing our new web application (stay tuned – more on that in a later post). Most of the people in the Group only have a single email address (that I know of). But a few have two or three addresses.
Annoying Thing Number 1
When I added one of the people with more then one email address, I couldn’t choose which email address would actually be associated with the Group. It turns out that Gmail just grabs the first email address (the “primary” address). The solution was clear – I just needed to edit those rapscallions who dared to have more then one email address such that the desired address was in first position. Surely that would solve the problem.
Alas, no.
Annoying Thing Number 2
I wanted to test my new Group to make sure the correct email addresses were being used, so I composed a new message. I typed the first few letters of the Group in the To box, and when the Group name appeared I pressed Enter – all the members of the Group were nicely plonked into the To box. However, as I checked each name/address, I noticed that Gmail had grabbed the wrong address for those the people who had multiple addresses. Despite my efforts at resolving the problem by re-ordering the email addresses. Grrrr. In the end I had to remove the “wrong” addresses completely, remove the people from the Group, re-add them, and then compose a new message.
Annoying Thing Number 3
You can’t sort or group or otherwise view the contacts as anything but a long list. This is not so much a bug as it is a pitiful design flaw. Surely Google could invest a bit of energy into allowing us to sort our contacts. Is that too much to ask?
I recently found a nice blog post where a fellow Gmailer had a bunch of very good suggestions for how Google might improve contact management.
C’mon Google – fix the damn thing!
