Voting for this – but I think more needs to be said: The v shortcut can be very useful, but it suffers some serious shortcomings for me at least.

To explain further, I must first state that I am not a gmail user; I get my mail from an exchange server, though I suspect an IMAP user would see the same behaviour.

Second, I have a large number of mail folders hierachically organized. Mail from previous years are found in folders inside y2014, y2013, and so forth.

As a result, I have many folders named the same. When filing away a message, if I type v and then start typing the name of a folder, the selected folder in the popup menu will change accordingly. However, which folder is selected seems to be sort of random! In the beginning, I believe it always selected the first folder with a matching name. This was often what I wanted, but more importantly, it was predictable. But lately, this has changed. But the behaviour seems relatively stable. Example: I have a folder named “com/publishers”. Early on, typing v and “pub” would select the first folder in the list with that name, which is what I wanted. But lately, it has started selecting “y2014/com/publishers” instead. My current workaround is to type the name of a nearby folder, then navgating to the folder I want using the arrow keys. This saves me from incessantly reaching for the trackpad, but it is very distracting.

In summary, the behaviour of the v shortcut needs to be predictable as well as aiding navigation in the popup list.

(Perhaps I should have added my own suggestion instead of voting for this and adding this long explanation? Oh well.)