[sublemonic]

I think HNers generally disagree with your statement:

This new feature GMail have announced is trivial and unimportant compared to many other features they could release.

The gmail team is not known for adding trivial or unimportant features. They probably deserve more credit than you are giving them.

Also, I'm not sure how delegation and folder sharing are related to email. Perhaps you could elaborate?

[mike-cardwell]

We have to disagree on the importance of this latest feature then.

Folder sharing: User A gives read or read/write access on one of their email folders to user B. I don't think I've ever used a mail service which doesn't support this simple long standing feature of email.

Delegation: User A delegates permission to user B to organise events in their Calendar, or to send mail on their behalf.

Delegation is very useful for people with secretaries or PAs. Folder sharing is very useful for people working in teams or all kinds.

[xiongchiamiov]

I have absolutely no desire to give anyone else access to my email, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the case for many other users as well. I do want the ability to send mail as another person (I have some 10-odd email accounts), but Gmail already handles that.

While this new feature may not be useful for corporate users, that doesn't mean it's not useful for users in general.

[mike-cardwell]

I have absolutely no desire to send mail as another person, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the case for many other users as well. I do want the ability so share mail folders with other people, and GMail doesn't handle that.

While this new feature may be useful for some users, that doesn't mean it's useful for users in general.

[btilly]

What fraction of users actually want folder sharing?

I've personally been using email since 1992, and I've never once used such a feature, nor has anyone asked me to use it. This is despite my having worked on a fair number of very productive teams.

Now I don't know how you personally use it. But I'm fairly sure that if I looked at your desired workflow using it, I could find another that was equally effective that didn't use it. Better yet, my alternative would be much more convenient for any software developers who don't happen to be working in a Windows environment.

[mike-cardwell]

> "What fraction of users actually want folder sharing?"

How on Earth would I know that?

We use folder sharing extensively at the University I work at. We have a folder structure which is shared by all staff which we call the Archive. People move email into the Archive which is owned by their role and which needs to be kept and shared with others. So you've never used folder sharing? I can show you several thousand people who have...

The ACL extension for IMAP looks as though it came out about 13 years ago!

> "Now I don't know how you personally use it. But I'm fairly sure that if I looked at your desired workflow using it, I could find another that was equally effective that didn't use it."

You know you could find a better workflow than the one I'm using, even though you don't know what I'm doing? magic.

> "Better yet, my alternative would be much more convenient for any software developers who don't happen to be working in a Windows environment."

The above makes no sense whatsoever and proves you completely missed the point. This isn't a Windows feature. I'm using it from Thunderbird on an OSX box right now, connecting to Dovecot IMAP server on a Linux box. Courier IMAP also supports it, as does Exchange and CommuniGate Pro, Cyrus and most open source webmail applications and email clients...

GMail doesn't support the IMAP ACL extension, nor does the webmail interface support any sort of sharing. That is a severe limitation.