5 ms·

Turn off Gmail’s conversation view

22 points by ukdm 16y ago

bambax 16y 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 http://www in Chrome will become an option someday...?
- eitally 16y 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).
  - bambax 16y 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.
    - eitally 16y ago
      I understand your POP-related complaints completely, and they're all 100% valid. For the others, though.... Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure. It only adds new mails if the heuristics are correct, those primarily being the subject, but also taking into account the recipients the timestamp, and who knows what else (they won't say). If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... especially if it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. If the subject of two messages is different, Gmail will never group them, ever. The biggest complaint I've heard from non-techy users is that with conversations they frequently miss messages because they can't adequately gauge what is unread, especially if the volume is high enough that things move off the first page with rapidity.
      - bambax 16y ago
        > If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... I'm not the one starting the conversation so I'm not at liberty to do anything. There is a thread. Then, days later, some member of this thread decides to start a new conversation by replying to this thread. It's the same "mailing list" but it should be a different thread. (But GMail has no way to know; this isn't a failure of GMail. The failure was, until today, to not allow to do without the threaded view). At least GMail should have had the option of breaking a thread; for each message in a thread, display a button that says "start a new thread here".
      - bambax 16y ago
        > Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure. For one, most people is not all people: why not let us set the sort order? And secondly, I too read "from the top down", but I want to start with most recent emails; and then when I have read them all (if I read them all) I'll know the whole of the conversation -- but I can stop at anytime and still have the most recent status. If you start reading the most ancient emails, then if you stop before arriving to the most recent ones (because of a distraction, a phone call, etc.) then you have an "open" conversation in your head that is waiting to be completed. That will create a memory leak ;-)
- ax0n 16y 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.
- bmelton 16y ago
  Does the hiding of 'http://www 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 16y 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.
    - bmelton 16y ago
      I personally prefer it. I don't need to see the http://www http://www before each link, and if I'm just glancing up at the location bar to see where I am, on browsers that do show it, I have to mentally parse that out. On the other hand, when I copy and paste it, that means I intend to DO something with it, like send it to a friend over IM, or email it or something, during which case I want a full, clickable link. Which is exactly what they give me. On the off chance that I want to copy and paste the de-http'd URL, then I am in no better (or worse) shape than I would be with any other browser, in that I have to paste it and strip the 'http://www http://www as I ordinarily would.
    - bambax 16y ago
      Same for me. But the upsetting part is the attitude of the Chrome Team, who says "if you don't like it just use another browser". Well, there are lots of things I like about Chrome; this seems too small a detail to stop using it. An option buried somewhere would make me completely happy. "Too many user choices are bad", certainly; but advanced options are a different thing from decisions every user would have to make. For now the only possibility is to download the source, set a boolean somewhere in the code, and compile your own version. How crazy is that?
      - lt 16y ago
        It's not about user decisions. It's about maintainability and testing. These are factors that are hugely affected by the combinatorial explosion of a ton of different settings. Developers often have to make a choice, and this is one of those times. You may not like it, but I don't blame them.
- slig 16y ago
  Chrome doesn't hide the "www", only the http:// http:// protocol, as there might be differences between the www.example.com and example.com DNS settings.
  - bambax 16y 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.)
ax0n 16y 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.
- bambax 16y ago
  I upvoted you because that is me. I want a stack.
  - bkudria 16y ago
    No, you don't.
roadnottaken 16y ago
IT'S ABOUT TIME!
boredguy8 16y 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.
- roadnottaken 16y 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 16y 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.
    - roadnottaken 16y ago
      That's a fair point. But nowadays OS'es all have good search tools (e.g. SpotLight in OS X) which makes it unnecessary to organize your files ("why organize when you can search"?). However, I still like my files organized so I can browse them to find things in a straightforward way. So, too, with e-mail.
  - boredguy8 16y 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?
ecoffey 16y ago
I still want an option to default open the reply at the bottom of the message instead of the top
- ax0n 16y ago
  This, but ultimately, I really wish people would inline-reply on longer correspondence, particularly in mailing lists.
bitskits 16y ago
...and then realize how awesome it is, and turn it back on.
AndrewDucker 16y 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.
- boredguy8 16y 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 16y 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.

22 points by ukdm 16y 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 http://www in Chrome will become an option someday...?

eitally 16y 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).
- bambax 16y 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.
  - eitally 16y ago
    I understand your POP-related complaints completely, and they're all 100% valid. For the others, though.... Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure. It only adds new mails if the heuristics are correct, those primarily being the subject, but also taking into account the recipients the timestamp, and who knows what else (they won't say). If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... especially if it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. If the subject of two messages is different, Gmail will never group them, ever. The biggest complaint I've heard from non-techy users is that with conversations they frequently miss messages because they can't adequately gauge what is unread, especially if the volume is high enough that things move off the first page with rapidity.
    - bambax 16y ago
      > If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... I'm not the one starting the conversation so I'm not at liberty to do anything. There is a thread. Then, days later, some member of this thread decides to start a new conversation by replying to this thread. It's the same "mailing list" but it should be a different thread. (But GMail has no way to know; this isn't a failure of GMail. The failure was, until today, to not allow to do without the threaded view). At least GMail should have had the option of breaking a thread; for each message in a thread, display a button that says "start a new thread here".
    - bambax 16y ago
      > Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure. For one, most people is not all people: why not let us set the sort order? And secondly, I too read "from the top down", but I want to start with most recent emails; and then when I have read them all (if I read them all) I'll know the whole of the conversation -- but I can stop at anytime and still have the most recent status. If you start reading the most ancient emails, then if you stop before arriving to the most recent ones (because of a distraction, a phone call, etc.) then you have an "open" conversation in your head that is waiting to be completed. That will create a memory leak ;-)
ax0n 16y 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.
bmelton 16y ago
Does the hiding of 'http://www 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 16y 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.
  - bmelton 16y ago
    I personally prefer it. I don't need to see the http://www http://www before each link, and if I'm just glancing up at the location bar to see where I am, on browsers that do show it, I have to mentally parse that out. On the other hand, when I copy and paste it, that means I intend to DO something with it, like send it to a friend over IM, or email it or something, during which case I want a full, clickable link. Which is exactly what they give me. On the off chance that I want to copy and paste the de-http'd URL, then I am in no better (or worse) shape than I would be with any other browser, in that I have to paste it and strip the 'http://www http://www as I ordinarily would.
  - bambax 16y ago
    Same for me. But the upsetting part is the attitude of the Chrome Team, who says "if you don't like it just use another browser". Well, there are lots of things I like about Chrome; this seems too small a detail to stop using it. An option buried somewhere would make me completely happy. "Too many user choices are bad", certainly; but advanced options are a different thing from decisions every user would have to make. For now the only possibility is to download the source, set a boolean somewhere in the code, and compile your own version. How crazy is that?
    - lt 16y ago
      It's not about user decisions. It's about maintainability and testing. These are factors that are hugely affected by the combinatorial explosion of a ton of different settings. Developers often have to make a choice, and this is one of those times. You may not like it, but I don't blame them.
slig 16y ago
Chrome doesn't hide the "www", only the http:// http:// protocol, as there might be differences between the www.example.com and example.com DNS settings.
- bambax 16y 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.)

ax0n 16y 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.

bambax 16y ago
I upvoted you because that is me. I want a stack.
- bkudria 16y ago
  No, you don't.

roadnottaken 16y ago

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

boredguy8 16y 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.

roadnottaken 16y 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 16y 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.
  - roadnottaken 16y ago
    That's a fair point. But nowadays OS'es all have good search tools (e.g. SpotLight in OS X) which makes it unnecessary to organize your files ("why organize when you can search"?). However, I still like my files organized so I can browse them to find things in a straightforward way. So, too, with e-mail.
- boredguy8 16y 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?

ecoffey 16y ago

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

ax0n 16y ago
This, but ultimately, I really wish people would inline-reply on longer correspondence, particularly in mailing lists.

bitskits 16y ago

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

AndrewDucker 16y 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.

boredguy8 16y 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 16y 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.