Carl Youngblood wrote: > Most of my email usage benefits so much from Gmail's conversation view > that this relatively minor inconvenience (I still can engage in > mailing list discussions without difficulty) is well worth it.
That's a shame because there have been really good, threaded mail readers available for years. Ranked in order of least useful to most useful we have: - unthreaded mail (in the beginning) - conversation-style display, which is inherently stateless, except for some general common topic (common parent post in other words) - threaded mail Ironically, "conversations" came years after the threaded model, probably as a response to broken e-mail clients like outlook which refused to set headers to properly thread e-mails (is that still broken?). Conversations, in my opinion, brings the horrid web forum interface to e-mail. Works great for less then a dozen messages, but for long threads (anyone on the python official list?) it's unworkable. Forums are the same way. popular forum topics with hundreds, if not thousands, of posts become incredibly clumsy. Proof of how broken the concept is in in how many times a popular forum topic has to be broken into new topics, and when people feel they have to "bump" topics if they aren't getting the replies they want. The threaded e-mail model works so well at managing this kind of thing. I only mention all this because even on Plug our threads can get kind of long, and I don't know how any of you gmail web users deal with it. At least with a decent client I can note that 10 e-mails are hanging off of a post by Stuart, so they ought to be good, and ignore the rest! Or any of you can notice that an e-mail from me started a branch and kill the entire thing right there! /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
