Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them.

This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make such glaring errors.

I hobble through that feature so often. You'd think a team that dogfoods this stuff would want to fix it.

That being said, I know the feeling the parent is talking about, but I never got that feeling with Gmail. It was something that worked and that's what I appreciated about it.

Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it.

Why is that so hard?

EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a settings page where you can see all of your labels in one place, and set each folder to show/hide/show if unread. It's specifically designed for the parent's use case, and yet he pretends that it doesn't exist.

This entire discussion is a nice demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- everyone's suddenly a designer with more skills and common sense than Google staff.

GMail is so much faster all the way around if you use keyboard shortcuts. Because I'm rarely using the mouse and the keyboard shortcuts don't change, the experience feels largely the same to me.

In the case of labels especially, gl followed by a few characters from the label, then Enter gets me to the label page before I would even have time to figure out where my mouse cursor is.