Thursday, July 5, 2007

Gmail’s "Me" Isn’t Always You

Now that’s an exotic usability bug in Gmail. When you open a mail in Google’s email client, the interface will always show who sent the mail to whom, like “Joe to me” or “Joe to me, info” (Gmail doesn’t say e.g. “Joe to Philipp”, but uses the “me” word throughout the interface). The first part will be who the email is addressed to, and subsequent parts will be people who may be on copy or also addressed. In the following screenshot (I edited out surnames), guess who below (older) mail from my inbox is addressed to then?

That’s right, it’s addressed to me. And guess who the following email is sent to?

Like you might guess now, I figured the mail – which simply started with “Hi” – was addressed to me (and though it was mentioning an interview that appeared on this blog, I couldn’t quite make sense of that email!). Turns out I was wrong, which I learned after formulating what must have been a confusing reply to the recipient: the mail was addressed to Aaron Swartz... and I was only on copy. What happened? Well: since some time I have an email forward set up which directs mails from info@blogoscoped.com to philipp.lenssen@gmail.com, which was the info part, on CC... and Aaron’s email is “me@aaronsw.com”, which Gmail trimmed to “me”!

Gmail’s "Me" Isn’t Always ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11)

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