Search Engine Journal

GMail Adds Delete Button, Hell Freezes Over, Pigs Fly

Someone at GMail got the bright idea after two years to add a delete button so users could actually delete their unwanted emails without having to dig into the system. Sure, Google feels that its conversation search technology is good enough so users won’t have to sort through trash or unwanted mails, and would forget about deleting them, leaving more mail and potentially more advertising impressions in the system.

Seems that user demand however got the better of GMail. Sushubh Mittal logged in today to find his Firefox extension for a GMail delete button wasn’t working - wonder if GMail’s new button blocked the extension?

Since almost two years, the company expected their customers to archives the mails instead of deleting them. To delete, users had to get into a dropdown and select the delete option.

Luckily, some Mozilla Firefox loving folks developed an extension to fix this issue temporarily. Today, when we logged into our accounts, the Extension based button was not working, and a new button was present in the default interface. And the oh-so-awesome New Feature! Link was back which made us very excited like always.

Looks like Google has finally realized that no matter how they want their users to treat their mails, they have to follow some age-old concepts in web mail interfaces.