On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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! > > I just delete the emails after I read them if I don't need the information, so I don't have any problem with threading or unwieldy conversations. It also makes it so that I don't mind when people quote others in their replies 'cause then I get some context if the topic is more than a couple of days old. I dunno. I guess I'm eighty percent stupid though. Joshua /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
