On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Kris Buelens <[email protected]> wrote:
> No, GMAIL is not simply subject based. I guess it uses the Message-Id: that > is part of an SMTP header. I believe the idea was that it would use the text search algorithms to build threads. But they sure also use the In-Reply-To: header that most MTA's use. Hey, even Outlook Express has an option to view the mail threaded (which I don't use because it often makes me miss things). The approach of digested mailing list would not work for me. That limits threading (if any) to messages that arrived on the same day. And for busy lists the digest the amount of text is beyond the threshold of what you can just do in between. Indeed gmail is threaded by nature, which helps to reduce the number of entries in your mailbox. When you are reading a thread and decide you just don't care about the rest, you can either archive the current thread (and any new mail on that thread will bring the entire thread back in your inbasket) or you "mute" it to even avoid it show up when more mails arrive on it. And I really like the "embarrassment prevention" when you reply to a thread. It shows a little indicator at the bottom that a reply from Alan (or someone else) just got in so you can peek at that and decide to take out some of your response because it has been said already (yes David, such a feature exists) or decide to discard your reply completely. To me the gmail user interface works like a mail agent should work. I find that I am much more productive this way. And if you're willing to pay for it, I think you can even get it without the advertising that normally pays your service. And strange enough, I think that the approach to simply keep all you mail actually saves storage space... Rob
