MiBlog

Gmail Conversation View - Why I switched it back on, back on

In October 2010, I drafted this post. Why I didn’t post it sooner? Face palm. Had I not procrastinated, Google would likely have implemented these fixes by now… :@

A while back—actually, the moment I officially committed to switching from hotmail to gmail—I began complaining about Gmail’s so-called Conversation View. I literally joined the club.

Luckily, a few months later Google activated an option allowing us dissenters to turn off the ‘feature’. I promptly did so.

[Un?]fortunately, I was by then used to the new way of emailing, and actually found the reversion to single threaded organization a major annoyance. I soon switched back.

The point is this: Gmail isn’t perfect (yet). Here’s why:

• While the option to group email conversations is a major advantage in that it keeps relevant info together in an easily accessible way, the simplicity of its grouping remains frustrating.
  • Currently, emails are grouped essentially by Subject line. This is a start, of course, but what if I want to change the subject line to add or subtract a couple words? New thread; lost my grouping.
  • Even more likely, what if someone emails me back from a fresh window rather than replying directly to my email? New thread; lost my grouping.
  • What I’m saying, then, is that I want a way to take two emails and merge their Conversation threads.
  • Similarly, if the topic being discussed should suddenly change within a Conversation, I want to be able to split that thread into two distinct Conversations.
  • The solution to both seems fairly trivial to me: Gmail already has the ability to delete any single message from a Conversation thread, or to ‘Mark Unread from here’ down, so presumably similar functionality for message grouping could be implemented without insurmountable redesign? (just a simple hash/id in the db, no?)
• Gmail’s underlying organizational philosophy is search-engine based, not chronology-centric. This makes perfect sense, given …Google. However, us humans are more often than not forced to sort things in chronological order in order to order and organize them in an orderly manner.
  • I want at least some rudimentary sorting options (like by date sent, date received, and date read). Conversations are handy for finding the threads I think have the info I want in them—and having the ability to group messages as I please would certainly alleviate much of this burden in the first place—but sometimes I need to find an email based on when I should have sent/received it more than what words I remember being used in it.
  • Even if I know the sender, if it’s someone who I sent a whole lot of emails too, scrolling through Conversations 20-a-page at a time is a blatantly needless hassle. (exacerbated by the fact that I don’t seem to be able change how many results fill a page of search results!)
  • Distilled: Conversation view is a welcome revolution in how emails are dealt with, but sometimes I need to be able to fall back to the old way, too.
• Another derivative of Conversation view is the fact that multiple email addresses can and will appear within a single thread. This poses the problem of what to do with the names of all these participants. Currently, Gmail solves this by listing the first and last names separated by an ellipsis to indicate more people are inside—e.g. Person1 .. Person100 (232).
  • This is, again, a start, but it’s also severely lacking in that sometimes the name of the person most crucial to that Conversation is buried within the dots, and I want to be able to see every person included in a Conversation.
  • This could be primitively fixed by having the list of names appear whenever one mouse-overs the ellipsis itself (but this would still require the client to work for this basic functionality, rather than simply have it offered to them ‘at-a-glance’).
  • Ideally, every name would just be listed. If this were, say, a Google Labs option, I would certainly be in favour of it making the message take up more than one line, if necessary; the time it would save me opening and scrolling through an email would be worth the occasional three-line message in my inbox..

Please, Google? Pretty please?