4 ms·

Is the GMail behavior described here accurate? Does GMail really hide the _latest_ email in a collection sharing similar sender and subject?

pbogle 8y ago
Actually, GMail expands the most recent email and collapses older messages. (I just double checked.) So the premise of the article seems a bit misguided.
killaken2000 8y ago
I know it hides similar parts of a series of emails because it cuts off my email salutation and sometimes people think that I'm being disrespectful. I wish I could stop it from doing that. If true, I wonder how similar these emails were to have that happen.
williamscales 8y ago
GMail will hide parts of a message that are similar to previous ones. When the entire message consists of what GMail considers to be quoted text, it doesn't really look like there's an email there. I just tried this myself and in the second password reset email, I only see a button with three little dots that says "show trimmed content" when I mouse over it. It's tiny and I wouldn't expect someone to figure it out if they didn't spend some time looking or have an idea of what happened.
- fatnoah 8y ago
  OMG, it's not just me. It's super frustrating on mobile. On certain threads, I'll literally spend 5 minutes just trying to find the new content.
  - mschaef 8y ago
    I still miss pine, tbh (If this reference is too old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) )
    - Splines 8y ago
      You can use the basic html version of gmail: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui I use this - it's way more responsive and faster than the current gmail UI. My only gripe with the basic html version is that the back button is broken when you're trying to go back to search results after clicking on an email (you need to click on "Go back to search results").
    - ars 8y ago
      > I still miss pine, tbh So use it then. alpine (the successor to pine) is my daily email client. I currently have 161,210 messages in my inbox, it handles it just fine. It's still supported, and has new features like UTF-8 support and viewing HTML emails (without the images). It's better than any other email program I've used with one exception: No images in HTML email (although you can view an HTML email in your browser, the attachments don't come along).
    - aidenn0 8y ago
      offlineimap and mutt work just fine for me...
      - jacobsenscott 8y ago
        It might work well for you, but are you sure your recipients aren't seeing emails that look like this? Sending plain text emails that look good when nearly every email client is mostly only tested with html emails is actually very difficult, and sometimes simply impossible. Format=Flowed doesn't always fix this. Plain text emails are defacto deprecated just because a lot very popular email clients don't handle them well. One major problem with plain text emails is the standard was created when nearly everyone had a screen wide enough to display at least 78 characters per line (or whatever it was). Today people spend most of their time on screens much narrower than that. FF is a half assed solution to that problem html was designed to work on a much wider variety of screen sizes so it works much better for email. I say this as an offlineimap/mu4e user who knows some of my recipients are seeing bad formatting and doesn't really care.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Author here. The one you got is yet another bug. It's also possible that the behavior changed since. In the case I described, the email is not opened with only 3 dots showing, it is instead completely collapsed. Like if you clicked the header to collapse it manually.

pbogle 8y ago

Actually, GMail expands the most recent email and collapses older messages. (I just double checked.) So the premise of the article seems a bit misguided.

killaken2000 8y ago

I know it hides similar parts of a series of emails because it cuts off my email salutation and sometimes people think that I'm being disrespectful. I wish I could stop it from doing that. If true, I wonder how similar these emails were to have that happen.

williamscales 8y ago

GMail will hide parts of a message that are similar to previous ones. When the entire message consists of what GMail considers to be quoted text, it doesn't really look like there's an email there. I just tried this myself and in the second password reset email, I only see a button with three little dots that says "show trimmed content" when I mouse over it. It's tiny and I wouldn't expect someone to figure it out if they didn't spend some time looking or have an idea of what happened.

fatnoah 8y ago
OMG, it's not just me. It's super frustrating on mobile. On certain threads, I'll literally spend 5 minutes just trying to find the new content.
- mschaef 8y ago
  I still miss pine, tbh (If this reference is too old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) )
  - Splines 8y ago
    You can use the basic html version of gmail: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui I use this - it's way more responsive and faster than the current gmail UI. My only gripe with the basic html version is that the back button is broken when you're trying to go back to search results after clicking on an email (you need to click on "Go back to search results").
  - ars 8y ago
    > I still miss pine, tbh So use it then. alpine (the successor to pine) is my daily email client. I currently have 161,210 messages in my inbox, it handles it just fine. It's still supported, and has new features like UTF-8 support and viewing HTML emails (without the images). It's better than any other email program I've used with one exception: No images in HTML email (although you can view an HTML email in your browser, the attachments don't come along).
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    offlineimap and mutt work just fine for me...
    - jacobsenscott 8y ago
      It might work well for you, but are you sure your recipients aren't seeing emails that look like this? Sending plain text emails that look good when nearly every email client is mostly only tested with html emails is actually very difficult, and sometimes simply impossible. Format=Flowed doesn't always fix this. Plain text emails are defacto deprecated just because a lot very popular email clients don't handle them well. One major problem with plain text emails is the standard was created when nearly everyone had a screen wide enough to display at least 78 characters per line (or whatever it was). Today people spend most of their time on screens much narrower than that. FF is a half assed solution to that problem html was designed to work on a much wider variety of screen sizes so it works much better for email. I say this as an offlineimap/mu4e user who knows some of my recipients are seeing bad formatting and doesn't really care.
user5994461 8y ago
Author here. The one you got is yet another bug. It's also possible that the behavior changed since. In the case I described, the email is not opened with only 3 dots showing, it is instead completely collapsed. Like if you clicked the header to collapse it manually.