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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

You haven't thought this one all the way through... Imagine a user names a folder "Bin", which maps to ID 123, and the internal trash folder maps to ID 7, and the user sees as "Trash", because that's their interface language.

The user now changes their interface language to England, and suddenly they have two "Bin" labels that map to different sets of things. They behave inconsistently and frustrate anyone who gets into that state. Some messages might even be in "Bin" and "Bin" at the same time! Searching for "in:Bin" returns just one set, or the other, or both.

Doesn't really sound like a good solution...

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Wouldn't it make more sense to, when the user switches languages, check for label/folder name collisions and deal with it then? Alternatively save all the built-in labels (Trash, Bin, etc) as reserved words so users can't create custom folders with those names?

> check for label/folder name collisions and deal with it then?

How?

> Alternatively save all the built-in labels (Trash, Bin, etc) as reserved

So now all localizations are reserved words? And ultimately, this may be a reasonable approach from the beginning, but how many people's accounts are you willing to break to institute this change now?

If there's a collision? Pop an error and offer to rename the custom folder..

This depends on who you want to prioritise.

How many people use Gmail in a language other than US English? How many people change their UI language and rename folders such that there is a clash?

Optimise for where it will have the most impact, and develop a work-around for the minority of users where this causes a problem.

> How many people use Gmail in a language other than US English?

You'd be surprised. There are only about 400 million native English speakers [0], and Gmail has 1.5 billion users [1].

If we assumed that all native English speakers use Gmail, they'd represent not even a third of the users. Of course, there are many non-native English speakers, but I'd assume a significant fraction of them would prefer to use Gmail in their language.

I'd argue i18n has a huge impact, but Google really doesn't optimize for it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/26/gmail-dominates-consumer-ema...

I think the person you're responding to is agreeing with you that you should optimize for languages other than English rather than for people naming a label "Bin" and then switching to the UK locale.

But how many of those "users" are actually unique?

I, personally, have 3 "GMail" accounts: one @gmail.com, one @ my own domain, and one for work. So if I were the average English-speaking user of GMail, having every English speaker be a user would pretty much cover the 1.5 billion.

(I do not, in any way, think I am the average—I merely seek to point out that it's significantly more complicated to calculate than your post suggests.)

> There are only about 400 million native English speakers [0], and Gmail has 1.5 billion users [1].

Don't assume that only native English speakers (want to) use things in English.

The real question is how many people use advanced searching. I would guess the answer is < 1%.

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