> One of Mutt's unusual strengths is that it actually displays message threads correctly. When people complain that they have trouble following email conversations involving groups of people, what they typically mean is that they are using a client such as Gmail that does not properly display the reply structure of email messages. When an email user hits the reply key, an In-Reply-To header should be added to the email. Mutt refers to these headers, and to the related References header, to keep track of which messages replied to what, and builds a tree to show the structure of the conversation. Some other mail clients attempt to construct this tree using only the Subject header
This seems somehow wild to me. Why don't other email apps use the appropriate header fields? Why do they even try to use the subject field? Why do they insist on quoting the whole thread text below the message body? Why not do all this the proper way?
Good questions! For these reasons and others, such as the lack of any concept of mail bouncing and the inability to even edit headers, I don’t regard Gmail as being an email client. Instead, I think of it as a kind of toy program that was designed to demonstrate what could be done with javascript, and it was an impressive demonstration when it came out.
I’ve had discussions with various groups that I’ve worked with where some people get the idea to move to Slack or some other platform, because email is not working well enough. When I ask them what the problem is with email, they start describing the shortcomings of...Gmail. They actually have no problem with email, they’ve just never used an email program.
As someone who just joined a small startup using google accounts, do you have any good recommendations for desktop/email clients? Prior company used outlook.
notmuch or mu4e are both quite good for email in general, including gmail. The setup isnt always the easiest, but worth it once you get the flow imho. Thunderbird if you like guis.
> This seems somehow wild to me. Why don't other email apps use the appropriate header fields? Why do they even try to use the subject field? Why do they insist on quoting the whole thread text below the message body? Why not do all this the proper way?
This all started with Microsoft Outlook back in the '90s. At that time, most email clients, even the GUI ones did handle threading using the References and In-Reply-To headers (even Outlook Express oddly enough). IIRC, the online webmail clients took the same approach that Outlook did in terms of message threading and quoting. As they became more popular and desktop clients fell by the wayside, the Outlook convention took over. FWIW, Thunderbird is one GUI based email client that also properly displays threaded messages.
More recently, email clients have introduced the conversation view where they can display a thread as a conversation by only showing the parts of the series of messages before the quoted original message. This has an unfortunate side effect of essentially not displaying any message where someone decides to trim quoted material and post their responses inline. In a client that expects top-posted responses, an inline response shows up as a blank message (making the recipient think that you sent a blank email by mistake).
But I do find it interesting that people want to treat email like a synchronous chat with a single thread of messages, but people want to have threaded conversations in chat clients like Slack.
Microsoft threads by subject (and will generate a new thread id if you change the subject in a reply) because they found a large minority of their users didn't use the address book, but instead searched for a recent email from the person they wanted to send to and replied to that, after changing the subject.
> because they found a large minority of their users didn't use the address book, but instead searched for a recent email from the person they wanted to send to and replied to that, after changing the subject.
That's exactly what I always do. And I don't do that to find the address. I do that intentionally because I actually want the whole history of communication (even if it spans years and hundreds of messages) with a particular party to be a single huge tree thread.
the only problem with this is that gmail does show the proper, header-referenced, thread structure. as well as subject “referenced”.
anyway one shouldn’t blame gmail. it’s outlook that forced gmail’s hand.
furthermore, like a bike vs car accident, you can be correct and still dead. mutts insistence of “keeping the thread” when users change the subject is “correct” yet still dead. 99% of users — aka normies — reply to an existing message when starting a new thread. changing the subject in almost all cases is intended to create a new thread, not a new subthread.
one has to work with the users you have, not the users you wish you had.
FWIW, in mutt tapping # on a message that should have been a new thread will make it such. And you can rejoin messages where people sent a new mail instead of a reply with &.
Things like this, along with tools like t-prot¹, allow you to live the mail you want while still interacting with others ;)
i'm not criticizing mutt at all here. in fact i am going to try it out for awhile. i never used mutt back in the day, as i was always a gnus user.
what i find fault with in the lwn article is the "attack" on gmail. gmail has its reasons for doing the things it does, good reasons.
i actually liked mulberry quite a lot. especially the feature where 'reply' brings up an interstitial allowing you to select to/cc/bcc for each recipient. another aspect of email completely lost on normies. but it's day has passed.
Author here: I understand your point, but I disagree that Gmail’s reasons are good reasons. Partly this is a difference in philosophy I suspect; we should all try to help each other to become better, and Gmail’s pandering to users’ poor habits just enables them to avoid gaining understanding that would help them in the long run. Another reason is that the Gmail type of threading simply doesn’t work in practice, especially when the conversation has more than three participants. I know this because of the way people try to find a “better” way by moving away from email, when a good portion of their frustration is due to the difficulty in following conversations, specifically because they are using Gmail. They have no idea that email already offers them what they need, because they’ve never used an actual email client.
I take your point, very well. But a fundamental disagreement we have is your generous opinion of the 90 %ile user's ability and desire to become an email expert. The loss of that battle was recognized in September 1993.
gmail didn't relinquish its duty to educate users as it became popular; it became popular (in part) because it did things in a simpler way, that users didn't have to "learn" how to use. The vast majority of folks do not care about such trivialities as following a thread. It requires forethought that they do not want to invest.
You have to meet users where they are at. One can wish for better users, sure. That's not a winning strategy.
As well, I still maintain it's unfair to pick on gmail. They had to follow Outlook. Outlook willfully broke threads for other MUAs by not including In-Reply-To headers. That was just evil. At least gmail generates In-Reply-To and References headers! Which Outlook drops. Outlook should be the bogeyman for your article, not gmail!
You are absolutely correct that Gmail followed a winning strategy; they’ve won, after all. The same is true of Facebook. From the point of view of corporate success, they are doing the right things. My point is just that these are not good things, in the larger sense.
Thank you for informing me about the role of Outlook in this. I used Gmail as my example because it seems to be taking over, at least for “normies”, as you call them. So the average person’s idea of what email is comes from experience with Gmail. It’s possible I’m underestimating the importance or prevalence of Outlook, as I deal less with corporate types than academic and publishing types.
This seems somehow wild to me. Why don't other email apps use the appropriate header fields? Why do they even try to use the subject field? Why do they insist on quoting the whole thread text below the message body? Why not do all this the proper way?