I love being organised. Anyone who’s worked with me knows this, and probably because I’ve tried to impose some sort of régime upon them because I know (and I do know) it’ll save us time and effort in the long term. This weekend, like most, I’ve been sifting through my inboxes and also through Google Reader in a task I like to think of as pruning.
I was in Gmail and searching for all unread emails from before I moved to the Netherlands, using the query is:unread before:2011/04/09. I knew I wouldn’t finish properly dealing with all eighty emails retured by that query; so I wanted to save the search for later. But after sniffing around Gmail’s interface for a bit, I discovered that there isn’t a native saved searches feature.
The excellent Greasemonkey tool is built into Google Chrome (something which most people aren’t aware of) so I searched for a Greasemonkey script to solve my problem; I didn’t need to worry about version compatibility or performance.
Well actually, it turns out I did need to. The only decent script I found can be found on this blog post from March 2005. Subsequent updates to Gmail (rather than subsequent versions of Chrome; what I meant by “version compatibility”) have broken this script so I’m still without a solution to my script lust.
But if you I think about it, it’s been almost seven years since that script’s feature on persistent.info and Gmail still doesn’t have a saved searches feature. I’m not sure how many people would use it but it sounds as if there isn’t that much demand out there except from me and possibly a handful of others; so it’s unlikely it’ll ever get included.
K Steinhardt 