Carl Youngblood wrote:
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.
You're missing a subtle but critical feature of threaded email clients. They have not only the ability to collapse threads by default (giving you your subtle gmail advantage), but show you the tree structure of your threads. You wouldn't represent your family history as a linked list. Why would you represent a tree of emails as a linked list?
Oh, and watching threads and killing them and everything that you like about conversations came from the groundbreaking threaded clients of yestermillenium. The only thing conversations didn't inherit was the proper paradigm.
Yes, gmail's web interface is an improvement over outlook and dozens of also-ran linux clients, but it's still fundamentally flawed.
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.
I have seen this too infrequently, too. But in 1994 I was using a freeware newsgroup reader (on Windows even) that did this. The sad state of email is another example of the evils of NIH syndrome, and gmail is just another data point.
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