Turn off Gmail’s conversation view
gmailblog.blogspot.com
gmailblog.blogspot.com
This concession is part of Google's drive for broader enterprise adoption. If it helps increase their deployment count (and it almost certainly will) it's a win-win for everyone.
Maybe I'm a "foot-dragging improvement hater" but it's much easier for me to remember "e-mail from Fred last Friday" and to find that by going to last Friday and looking for "Fred" than it is to remember the last time the conversation was updated.
Much easier than scanning through pages and pages of messages.
Also, simply doing "from:Fred" will list, in the results thread, the date of the message from Fred, even if activity has happened in the thread since then. It _also_ has the benefit of, once clicked on, letting you see that Sue followed up an hour ago to mention she took care of the issue. Going through e-mail chronologically, who knows how much time you could have spent on that before you reached the "all taken care of" message?
A real example that I work with a lot: I agree to buy something from someone on a forum. I have a series of transactional emails from the forum about the topic, possibly a paypal receipt, and a UPS ship notice. Creating a whole label for that transaction is overkill (I don't need to "name" the transaction, and label sprawl is already fairly unmanageable): I just want a way to correlate those messages together for quick review later.
I can't do that today, and worse, I've occasionally had cases where Gmail creates a "conversation" out of several Paypal receipts, all for unrelated items.
Like I said, I love the idea of conversations. I just wish I had more control over them.
I use my email inbox as a to-do list. I want to be able to keep individual emails sitting there, not conversations. I may have an email conversation with dozens, or hundreds of emails in it, and just one that I care about for later. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to keep them all together.
So maybe we can hope that not hiding http://www in Chrome will become an option someday...?
So, usually, I read mail outside GMail -- but GMail does not know what mail is already read. In a big thread, it opens all "unread" emails: the tens I read already and the last one I'm interested in. This is crazy and infuriating.
Also, why are most recent emails in a thread at the bottom?? (maybe it can be configured somewhere?)
And finally, like most "intelligent" features, it's much too smart (or not enough): it adds new mails to old threads.
Many non-techies (and some techies as well) take an old email that has the list of recipients they're looking for, to start an entirely new discussion.
Aggregating those new emails to an old thread that has nothing to do whatsoever with the subject at hand is idiotic.
I just want mail sorted ante-chronologically; and then I just deal with the sorting myself.
Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure.
It only adds new mails if the heuristics are correct, those primarily being the subject, but also taking into account the recipients the timestamp, and who knows what else (they won't say).
If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... especially if it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. If the subject of two messages is different, Gmail will never group them, ever.
The biggest complaint I've heard from non-techy users is that with conversations they frequently miss messages because they can't adequately gauge what is unread, especially if the volume is high enough that things move off the first page with rapidity.
I'm not the one starting the conversation so I'm not at liberty to do anything.
There is a thread. Then, days later, some member of this thread decides to start a new conversation by replying to this thread. It's the same "mailing list" but it should be a different thread. (But GMail has no way to know; this isn't a failure of GMail. The failure was, until today, to not allow to do without the threaded view).
At least GMail should have had the option of breaking a thread; for each message in a thread, display a button that says "start a new thread here".
For one, most people is not all people: why not let us set the sort order?
And secondly, I too read "from the top down", but I want to start with most recent emails; and then when I have read them all (if I read them all) I'll know the whole of the conversation -- but I can stop at anytime and still have the most recent status.
If you start reading the most ancient emails, then if you stop before arriving to the most recent ones (because of a distraction, a phone call, etc.) then you have an "open" conversation in your head that is waiting to be completed. That will create a memory leak ;-)
Sorry, I'm forever spoiled by GMail's automatic threading now.
On the other hand, when I copy and paste it, that means I intend to DO something with it, like send it to a friend over IM, or email it or something, during which case I want a full, clickable link. Which is exactly what they give me.
On the off chance that I want to copy and paste the de-http'd URL, then I am in no better (or worse) shape than I would be with any other browser, in that I have to paste it and strip the 'http://www as I ordinarily would.
But the upsetting part is the attitude of the Chrome Team, who says "if you don't like it just use another browser".
Well, there are lots of things I like about Chrome; this seems too small a detail to stop using it. An option buried somewhere would make me completely happy.
"Too many user choices are bad", certainly; but advanced options are a different thing from decisions every user would have to make.
For now the only possibility is to download the source, set a boolean somewhere in the code, and compile your own version. How crazy is that?
Developers often have to make a choice, and this is one of those times. You may not like it, but I don't blame them.