One of the big things I’ve been complaining Gmail lacks landed with a boom last week: drag and drop categories.  Thanks Google, it was a long time coming but it was an obviously correct thing to do.

But there are others:

1)  Give us the option to turn off threaded views.  Don’t take threaded views away, lots of people like threaded views, but lots don’t .  Surely this would be a trivial modification that would make many users happy.

2)  A preview pane.  Everybody else does it.  Its one of the hallmarks of modern mail interfaces.  At least give us the option.

3) A general refresh of the interface.  While the first two are trivial, this last is a little more substantial, but just as necessary.  The Outlook Web interface and Windows Live Mail interface look much sleeker and more modern while Gmail just looks dowdy.

4)  Give us better ways to make Gmail interact with our desktops.  None of the plugins for Firefox is worth a plugged nickel.  They either fail at supporting Google apps accounts or they don’t support multiple accounts.

Here’s a potential strategy that takes all of that makes all of that easy for Google.  Very easy.  Just modify the Outllook  Sync program Google just released so that it supports free accounts, supports multiple accounts, and syncs tasks as well as mail, contacts and calendars.  That would take care of everything.