Turn off Gmail’s conversation view

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html

by ukdm • 16 years ago

22 31 16 years ago

gmailblog.blogspot.com

bambax7• 16 years ago

Oooooh. This is the best news of the week, maybe of the month. We've been waiting for sooo long for this. I never thought it would actually happen. So sometimes Google does listen.

So maybe we can hope that not hiding http://www in Chrome will become an option someday...?

eitally2• 16 years ago

How will you use it in a way that benefits you? My experience has been that it makes the experience much worse since you have to search for everything to find related messages and you can't click-to-sort the column headers (like on a thick client).

bambax7• 16 years ago

I use a thick client mainly; I use GMail as an archive or when I'm away; GMail downloads my mail via POP (my primary address is not GMail).

So, usually, I read mail outside GMail -- but GMail does not know what mail is already read. In a big thread, it opens all "unread" emails: the tens I read already and the last one I'm interested in. This is crazy and infuriating.

Also, why are most recent emails in a thread at the bottom?? (maybe it can be configured somewhere?)

And finally, like most "intelligent" features, it's much too smart (or not enough): it adds new mails to old threads.

Many non-techies (and some techies as well) take an old email that has the list of recipients they're looking for, to start an entirely new discussion.

Aggregating those new emails to an old thread that has nothing to do whatsoever with the subject at hand is idiotic.

I just want mail sorted ante-chronologically; and then I just deal with the sorting myself.

ax0n3• 16 years ago

re: FW: re: RE: re: re: Re: fw: re: re: re: re: thursday meeting

Sorry, I'm forever spoiled by GMail's automatic threading now.

bmelton2• 16 years ago

Does the hiding of 'http://www really bother you? I remember it bothering me, until the first time I copy / pasted the URL and it is there in the pasted output.

saurik• 16 years ago

It doesn't bother me /much/, but I can feel it: as I copy/paste things from there a lot, as well as sometimes edit URLs, I'm in this interesting position of having to remember weird rules regarding what is theoretically in the box and what is actually in the box, which seems really silly.

slig• 16 years ago

Chrome doesn't hide the "www", only the http:// protocol, as there might be differences between the www.example.com and example.com DNS settings.

bambax7• 16 years ago

Ok, maybe. http: and // are two different things anyway; http is the protocol and // is the start of the path. (They (the Chrome team) seem to put them in the same "useless" basket.)

ax0n3• 16 years ago

Because some people really love it when their email inbox is a giant, chaotic FILO buffer that matches the "In Box" tray on their cluttered 1960s-era desk.

bambax7• 16 years ago

I upvoted you because that is me. I want a stack.

bkudria• 16 years ago

No, you don't.

roadnottaken3• 16 years ago

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

boredguy84• 16 years ago

Gmail conversations are the best 'innovation' in email since RFC822. However, as I have been dealing with migrating an education environment to Google Apps, I can confirm that some people are foot-dragging improvement-haters.

This concession is part of Google's drive for broader enterprise adoption. If it helps increase their deployment count (and it almost certainly will) it's a win-win for everyone.

roadnottaken3• 16 years ago

The problem with conversation-view is that it breaks the simple chronology of e-mail. If I want to look at an e-mail that I remember receiving last Friday, I have to scan through my "conversations" until I recognize the correct subject for that particular conversation which will appear in a seemingly random order, depending on the last time I replied or received a reply.

Maybe I'm a "foot-dragging improvement hater" but it's much easier for me to remember "e-mail from Fred last Friday" and to find that by going to last Friday and looking for "Fred" than it is to remember the last time the conversation was updated.

txxxxd• 16 years ago

Just click "show search options" and enter "Fred" in the from box and "Friday" in the date box.

Much easier than scanning through pages and pages of messages.

boredguy84• 16 years ago

I enjoy not having to mentally catalog any dates on my messages. "email from Fred last Friday, or the one from a little earlier that day, or was it maybe the day before" is far closer to my mental time map if I were to try and catalog that day. I remember topics way more than I remember dates, and most people are similar. "from:fred feature timeline" is going to be a FAR faster search than would paging through screens of email. Most 'knowledge workers' process 150 emails a day, on average. Expending any effort to track that seems silly to me.

Also, simply doing "from:Fred" will list, in the results thread, the date of the message from Fred, even if activity has happened in the thread since then. It _also_ has the benefit of, once clicked on, letting you see that Sue followed up an hour ago to mention she took care of the issue. Going through e-mail chronologically, who knows how much time you could have spent on that before you reached the "all taken care of" message?

sundae79• 16 years ago

Every decent email client always had a "group by" function which you could have used.Now if ou are talking about yahoo mail vs hotmail vs gmail, then fine.

boredguy84• 16 years ago

Conversation view does a lot more than just group messages by subject.

ecoffey• 16 years ago

I still want an option to default open the reply at the bottom of the message instead of the top

ax0n3• 16 years ago

This, but ultimately, I really wish people would inline-reply on longer correspondence, particularly in mailing lists.

bitskits• 16 years ago

...and then realize how awesome it is, and turn it back on.

AndrewDucker• 16 years ago

Oh, thank goodness.

I use my email inbox as a to-do list. I want to be able to keep individual emails sitting there, not conversations. I may have an email conversation with dozens, or hundreds of emails in it, and just one that I care about for later. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to keep them all together.

boredguy84• 16 years ago

I agree that it would be nice to be able to "fork" a conversation easily. Just as an FYI: you can "star" individual e-mails (instead of threads), and when you click that subject, it expands only your starred message. I've found this solves the "only need one" problem for me, while still preserving context, should I need it.

logic• 16 years ago

I love conversation view, but I hate the fact that I have no way of manually "breaking" a conversation when Gmail guesses incorrectly, or more generally, when I want to logically group a set of messages together.

A real example that I work with a lot: I agree to buy something from someone on a forum. I have a series of transactional emails from the forum about the topic, possibly a paypal receipt, and a UPS ship notice. Creating a whole label for that transaction is overkill (I don't need to "name" the transaction, and label sprawl is already fairly unmanageable): I just want a way to correlate those messages together for quick review later.

I can't do that today, and worse, I've occasionally had cases where Gmail creates a "conversation" out of several Paypal receipts, all for unrelated items.

Like I said, I love the idea of conversations. I just wish I had more control over them.

Turn off Gmail’s conversation view

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