3 ms·

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 c

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?
sundae79 16y 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.
- boredguy8 16y ago
  Conversation view does a lot more than just group messages by subject.

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?

sundae79 16y 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.

boredguy8 16y ago
Conversation view does a lot more than just group messages by subject.