On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Threads really only matter when responses are slow enough that you
>> forget the context - in which case you probably aren't all that
>> interested anyway.
>
> Or when you are involved in several conversations at the same time,
> and don't want to get confused. Or when you want your e-mail
> correspondences (and especially mailing lists) to be sorted in a neat
> way, like a filesystem tree. It can be very convenient, I am using
> threaded view in KMail all the time, for all my e-mail activity ---
> very easy to organize e-mails in an intuitive way. :-)
I've never been able to sort things in a way that makes any sense -
and I don't expect conversations to have any natural order. I just
want a very good search mechanism to find anything based on any
snippet I happen to remember or need at the time.
>> With thunderbird I normally don't use a threaded
>> view but sometimes flip to it (which is sort of awkward except on a
>> Mac where you can use OS facilities to map a key to a multi-step
>> operation). But in gmail I do like their normal 'conversation'
>> presentation where the previously read messages are mostly hidden but
>> accessible with a click and the unread messages are all opened
>> together with large blocks of quoted text mostly hidden. I'm used to
>> reading 'backwards' in time order so I know what has already been
>> answered, but the gmail view is a little nicer to see the new portion
>> in order and in context.
>
> What I miss a lot in gmail's web interface is proper threading. That
> "conversation" organization of e-mails is essentially the same thing,
> only done worse. There is no way to distinguish sub-threads of a given
> thread. Everything within one "conversation" is being displayed
> linearly, instead of a natural tree-ordering. When a thread starts to
> branch out into several directions at the same time, gmail's
> "conversation" idea becomes worse than useless.
True, but why do you care? Every message stands on its own and
normally carries any needed quoted context. I just read unread
messages and respond or not. The only place the history matters is if
you want to see if the answer you are about to give (or need yourself)
has already been posted. But if you are caught up on the unread
messages in the conversation (which all show at once) you'll already
know that, and in any case the branches in the history don't matter in
this regard.
> I use a gmail account on a regular basis, but try to avoid their web
> interface whenever I can. KMail is so much better (for me at least)...
I used to only log in when I wanted to search messages that I had
deleted locally, but It has gotten a lot better, with many more
options that you can activate in the settings. The one that matters
the most to me is to auto-advance to the next unread conversation as
you archive/delete the current one instead of re-displaying the inbox.
It is still slightly clunky in how you have to do multi-selects and
move things compared to native applications, but not bad overall and
meshes conceptually with the way the gmail phone app works so it is
easy to stay current when reading on the phone but put off replying
until you have a better keyboard. And of course the web interface
means you don't have to configure a bunch of stuff to get imap readers
synchronized across all of your computers (which I did anyway with
thunderbird - I just don't use it as often now).
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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