Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Why doesn’t Gmail have a delete button?

I’m sure they have gotten tons of requests for it, and I know you can add it via GreaseMonkey (although some people have been locked out their accounts after using it). I can’t imagine why the Gmail developers wouldn’t just add it, I’m sure Google has the resources and it can’t be too difficult.

I guesss because Google would prefer you got into the habit of archiving all mails rather than deleting them. There must be some business value to a large database of mails stored on Google’s servers and mineable by them, even if they are of no value to the mailbox owner.

I too have gotten into the habit of deleting rarely, but the lack of an upfront delete button still irks me.

Like Sumit says, I imagine it has to do with the philosophy of the application.

Just use the “Move to Trash” select and periodically empty things from there. I’ve never missed having a delete button, and I don’t think I ever will.

I realize Google may want to users to hold on to everything, but I still think it sucks from a usability standpoint. If I get a some sort of chain letter or maybe a dupe of a msg I get at another address, it would be nice to be able to delete it in one step without having to use the pull down menu.

Well, usability standpoint - if you want to have too much buttons, you have to think about placing them properly not to confuse users. Therefore it’s quit a common (and IMO meaningful) practice to hide less frequently used actions in menu instead of propagating them with buttons. And “delete” is IMO exactly such kind of action, especially in webmail providing 2.5 GB of space.

[...] I’ve complained about this before, so I was pretty happy when I saw on on Ron’s blog that Gmail finally adding a delete button! Of course, deleted messages still hang around for 30 days, buts at least I can just get of chain letters or duplicate messages without going through the drop down menu. [...]