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Comment by gmisra | Hacker News Reader

Apparently I am one of those haters. I guess "Is this really a thing people have trouble with?" is not a valid question, but I really don't understand when/where/why this thread-splitter feature would be useful, let alone useful enough to enough people to warrant extended time on the HN front page.

Can somebody (who won't presuppose my motivation or my opinion) answer my question?

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Our users have asked for this for 2 use cases:

1) You send an email bcc'ing a bunch of people. Those people start responding, Gmail threads it into 1 thread. Sometimes you want this and sometimes you don't

2) The topic of a thread changes and you want to split the thread into two logical threads.

alooPotato: Is there way to split it off to another thread while keeping the same subject?

Currently we have this limitation where the new thread has to have a different subject but we're working on removing that restriction. Should be a few more days before thats ready.

If you receive many mails from a form in a web page, and all of them have the same subject and have a small time difference, the Gmail puts all of them in a single thread. If you need to track the answers of each user individually, it becomes a mess.

(One possible solution is editing the formail.php to hnge the emails subjects and make them different, for example add the submitter name, the submission hour. Last time, I just added a random number, it's slightly confusing but it solves the problem.)

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