

Turn off Gmail’s conversation view - ukdm
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html

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boredguy8
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.

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roadnottaken
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.

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txxxxd
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.

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roadnottaken
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.

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ax0n
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.

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

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bkudria
No, you don't.

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logic
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.

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AndrewDucker
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
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.

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bambax
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...?

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slig
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.

~~~
bambax
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.)

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

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

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

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roadnottaken
IT'S ABOUT TIME!

