It’s amazing how often we will silently live with things we know are built or designed wrong. Today I’m speaking about something that might seem trivial to some, but bugs the shit of out me – webmail message navigation.
Can we come to a agreement on what wording we use when navigating through email archives? I try to keep to my one ‘main’ email account for the majority of my email communicating, but occasionally I have to dip into my other ‘alternate’ accounts. Each one of these accounts has a different way of navigating back to older emails and forward to newer emails.
Below are screenshots from the 3 main applications I use – GMail, YahooGroups & SquirrelMail:

GMail

Newer & Older – there’s no sitting, blinking and pondering where these 2 links are taking me. Simple clear English for simple navigating. Thank you Google.

Yahoo Groups

Newer & Older – Awesome, Google must have taken pointers from Yahoo. Too bad these 2 links are only on the Messages List page. 🙁

Next and Prev – What happened to Older and Newer? Now what the f#ck to I pick? Turns out Next takes me to newer messages and Prev takes me to older ones. Too bad they’re in the reverse order as GMail.

SquirrelMail

Previous & Next – Ahhh, only through using SquirrelMail for years to I know that Previous will actually take me to newer messages and Next will take me to older messages.