On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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!
You're missing a subtle but critical feature of Google's conversation view. A conversation only occupies a single line in my inbox, even if it has over 100 messages in it. That is absolutely key. I don't want to see an enormous thread. Most of the time I can archive it, mute it, or otherwise stuff it away somewhere with a few keystrokes without ever having to see it all. And no matter where it is in my mail client, it's always a single fungible chunk that I can manipulate atomically. I have not yet seen another mail client that treats threads/conversations quite like this. Many come close, but in some way or another fall short. Also, Google is not stupid about how they do conversations. They try to shrink things down for you where possible. and suppress redundant information. I have also not seen this done well in another client. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
