Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Google needs to learn archiving

I use Gmail and I especially like the way it handles trash: when you delete a message, it remains in the trash for 30 days, allowing rescue if you need it again before then. Nice - it's almost like a regular records schedule. But the trash is searchable only if you're looking in the trash folder. That is, you can search the trash, or you can search your Inbox + Archives, but not all three at once.

I can see why you wouldn't want the messages in your trash to show up in every search. They only stay around the 30 days as a measure of disaster avoidance. But there are so many messages that have a short, but highly relevant, lifespan and it would be nice to be able to put these in a folder that showed up in search results, but also purged itself without manual intervention. C'mon, Google! Learn something from the records managers!

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