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Comment by roadnottaken | Hacker News Reader

The problem with conversation-view is that it breaks the simple chronology of e-mail. If I want to look at an e-mail that I remember receiving last Friday, I have to scan through my "conversations" until I recognize the correct subject for that particular conversation which will appear in a seemingly random order, depending on the last time I replied or received a reply.

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.

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Just click "show search options" and enter "Fred" in the from box and "Friday" in the date box.

Much easier than scanning through pages and pages of messages.

That's a fair point. But nowadays OS'es all have good search tools (e.g. SpotLight in OS X) which makes it unnecessary to organize your files ("why organize when you can search"?). However, I still like my files organized so I can browse them to find things in a straightforward way. So, too, with e-mail.

I enjoy not having to mentally catalog any dates on my messages. "email from Fred last Friday, or the one from a little earlier that day, or was it maybe the day before" is far closer to my mental time map if I were to try and catalog that day. I remember topics way more than I remember dates, and most people are similar. "from:fred feature timeline" is going to be a FAR faster search than would paging through screens of email. Most 'knowledge workers' process 150 emails a day, on average. Expending any effort to track that seems silly to me.

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?

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