Show HN: Gmail Thread Splitting

https://www.streak.com/split-gmail-conversation-threads-break

by alooPotato • 12 years ago

59 28 12 years ago

alooPotato5• 12 years ago

We started playing with the new Gmail API (https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/) and created this fun little feature.

Ever notice Gmail sometimes gmail threads things it shouldn't? (i.e. when you bcc a lot of people). We built a way for you to break of a subset of the messages into their own thread.

Major_Grooves• 12 years ago

I haven't tried it yet, but oh my I've been waiting ages for you guys to add this feature! I'm sure it wasn't easy.

For context, the merging of emails threads in Gmail would at times make Streak unusable. This should be a big boost to Streak usability!

I also notice you guys added a "reminder" feature - effectively putting you head-on with Boomerang (which I currently pay for).

I have Streak, YesWare and Boomerang installed in my Gmail. It's too many add-ons for my liking. Boomerang, although the only one I currently pay for, seems to be the one that will have to go.

math0ne• 12 years ago

I have never understood gmails features. They consitantly do not work for me, maybe the way i use email is too old school or something.

Threads are consistently broken, the messages are in the wrong order and are almost never grouped logically with seemingly random emails getting placed in same thread.

The new tab system seems to only be right about 30% of the time, I constantly have extreamly important emails going to the promotions and updates tab even after I have seemingly said all further emails of this type should go to primary.

I'm genuinely curious do these features work well for others? Am I alone in finding that these things just don't work?

neals• 12 years ago

Works near-perfect for me. The tabs work, the threads work. Happy gmailer right here! :)

I do everything from gmail, it's pretty much my life. I receive about 50 mails a day. I have important logs and reports from my servers come into gmail. I hardly ever have to re-organize.

Now, how do we find out the difference between how you and I use gmail?

tokenizerrr• 12 years ago

The only issue I personally ever had was gmail tagging almost anything as spam after I initially imported all my old email. It would even tag mails from my contacts as spam, but this stopped after a week or so. I've never encountered anything like what you describe.

aleem4• 12 years ago

The biggest productivity boosters are filters and labels, once you have them setup. This works if you are working on recurring themes (long running projects, recurring tasks such as billing, etc). I imagine everyone has keyboard shortcuts enabled.

If you like using labels, you should probably be using sub-labels also.

Another trick that is indispensable to me is creating a contact for "note to self" with myhandle+note@gmail.com. Then you can filter such mails and apply a yellow label. With this setup you can send yourself notes whenever you want. You can also add private notes to existing threads which I find very helpful.

I may be wrong but I think emails in tabs are classified based on the email address so it may not work when the email address changes. It should work if you continue training but I am speaking only from personal experience.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Just use Thunderbird. Even Outlook and Apple Mail are better.

gmisra2• 12 years ago

My favorite thread splitting plugin is "editing the subject field when replying". Is this really a thing that people have trouble with?

flavor8• 12 years ago

I don't see anything in your privacy policy about email handling, but maybe I'm just skimming too fast.

When I click on install on the extension, it says that it requires access to *.mailfoogae.appspot.com; do you route my mail through your app in order to add this feature to gmail, or is it done completely locally within the sandbox of my account/browser?

alooPotato5• 12 years ago

In order to make this particular feature work, we hit the Gmail API with your Oauth credentials (which you can revoke at anytime). The actual process of splitting up the thread requires us to download some of your inbox content, modify it, then upload it. We do not store a copy of your mail ever.

aleem4• 12 years ago

I have very rarely run into misbehaved threading. Even so, for me personally it's not enough to warrant the effort of doing a manual split. Threads are ephemeral and it's fairly trivial to change the subject and fork the thread.

However, I would really love to see thread merging or some kind of grouping into a master thread which can track all the sub-threads. I am fairly certain this would have very high utility for a lot of other people here especially if its dead simple to do (group > search thread > select thread > ok). I could easily use this to merge a bug report email thread with the internal bug tracking thread, etc. Or a candidate's job application with his interview feedback, etc.

OmarIsmail• 12 years ago

This is pretty much Streak's core use case. You group threads (and other data) into a "box".

For your examples specifically you mention candidate tracking or bug tracking. Those are both default pipeline templates in our system.

alooPotato5• 12 years ago

This is essentially our main product - Streak.com.

We have a blog post on how we use Streak for bug tracking internally: http://blog.streak.com/2013/07/how-streak-uses-streak-to-tra...

aleem4• 12 years ago

You'll have to excuse me for not having noticed this, it's the first I have heard of Streak. This is indeed quite impressive and comprehensive.

ericz• 12 years ago

Bravo. Ignore the haters who haven't run into thread issues and thus believe no one else can possibly run into these issues. "Just change the subject!" Clearly these people have never sent a bulk email, or considered the fact that others may use email differently from them. Really tired of this mentality of "I don't have complete information but I think I'm great thus I'm just going to assume you are clueless".

aleem4• 12 years ago

"I don't have complete information but I think I'm great thus I'm just going to assume you are clueless".

That's a straw man if I ever saw one. No one here claims to be great. And no one is calling this product clueless. In fact all the discourse thus far is fairly civil other than this comment which comes off as hostile.

There will always be doubters, that doesn't make them haters. Why would they hate anyway? Shunning them as clueless and ignorant won't convert them--they'll only dislike you more for labelling them as such.

On topic, changing the subject is a means to accomplishing thread splitting and people do it for that reason. It may not work for everyone but it does indeed work and works reasonably well. There is nothing self-aggrandising about that.

latifnanji272• 12 years ago

Sounds like the opposite of what hackernews is about.

gmisra2• 12 years ago

Apparently I am one of those haters. I guess "Is this really a thing people have trouble with?" is not a valid question, but I really don't understand when/where/why this thread-splitter feature would be useful, let alone useful enough to enough people to warrant extended time on the HN front page.

Can somebody (who won't presuppose my motivation or my opinion) answer my question?

alooPotato5• 12 years ago

Our users have asked for this for 2 use cases:

1) You send an email bcc'ing a bunch of people. Those people start responding, Gmail threads it into 1 thread. Sometimes you want this and sometimes you don't

2) The topic of a thread changes and you want to split the thread into two logical threads.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

If you receive many mails from a form in a web page, and all of them have the same subject and have a small time difference, the Gmail puts all of them in a single thread. If you need to track the answers of each user individually, it becomes a mess.

(One possible solution is editing the formail.php to hnge the emails subjects and make them different, for example add the submitter name, the submission hour. Last time, I just added a random number, it's slightly confusing but it solves the problem.)

ramoq2• 12 years ago

For someone who runs into this issue quite often; this is a great add-on. You'd be surprised how many issues and embarrassing emails have arisen due to Gmail incorrectly threading emails. Great job Streak :)

p.s. Is it just me, but I can't fathom why the Gmail team doesn't scoop these guys up ASAP :)

fjolthor• 12 years ago

Yes, it's so obvious it's hard to see why Google hasn't implemented it already. I wonder what will happen with this project, unlikely that Google would acquire something rather than assign a small team to fix this within a week?

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Nice.

I'm personally waiting for a tool to group and split mails in a mailing-group-compatibile tree view. Or at least something respecting the usual headers mailing groups use to mark which mails belong to which thread (so that when you change the topic the e-mail doesn't go to a different thread in GMail).

Not that I care about it for 99% of my conversations, but one Hackerspace I subscribe to seems to be stuck in 1980s Unix Land, and get terribly annoyed at people using GMail for mailing ;).

latifnanji272• 12 years ago

AWESOME feature.

oneeyedpigeon• 12 years ago

It's been renamed from "Thread Breaker", hasn't it? Because it's still called that in the screenshot of the 'More' menu, alongside "Split the Thread".

(Thread Splitter's a much better name :)

asah• 12 years ago

Another amazing feature from the Streak team. My whole company is thoroughly addicted.

Show HN: Gmail Thread Splitting

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