Thread emails in the email list

Some more food for thought:

Mailody has somewhat unique behaviour and sorts by youngest child:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

There are multiple pseudo-standards to relate messages:

References:
In-Reply-To:
Thread-*: (written by Microsoft products)

We should show the number of messages beside a thread.

One thread should be treated as having the date of the latest message in it.

+1 to conversation view.

This will ensure a million users on release.. seriously. There's not a single (free) client out there that does conversation view., I know I would switch to using this client rather than webmail to access my account. This should be made a high priority.

What's the difference between #2 and #3?

#2 is tree like view of the mails..

+ from A
| + reply to A from B
| | + reply to B from A
| + reply to A from C
| | + reply to C from A
.. and so on

Conversation view is like gmail. Just a single thread of replies to the main mail, arranged in chronological order.

The latter is way moreuser friendly, and a much requested feature in mail readers.

~Anil

They all have their merits; I believe the best option would be to let the user decide through an options dialog or something.

If they have to pick one or the other though, my vote is in for conversation view. There's a reason Gmail is so popular in this sense.

Our (and by our I mean elementary) goal has been and is to create "sensible defaults", rather than bother the user with an option such as that. Personally, I don't have a preference as to which view we choose, but I certainly would not want to be asked about it. Postler should do what is best for the most people.

In this case I vehemently posit that conversation (and not tree-threaded) is the "best" view for most of your average user who handles (replies to about 30-50) upto a hundred mails a day. There's a reason Gmail is so popular, and not many use pop/smtp clients to access it.. the interface provided by the web interface is very intuitive. Collating similar subject mails into one makes sense usability-wise, and saves screen estate, that would otherwise be littered with "Re: Re:" and "Fwd: Re: Re:" items.

Conversation-view is one thing that will guarantee a 100,000 users on the first release, because it is a much requested feature, that the incumbent Thunderbird and Evolution clients have not supported (look at the download numbers for the addons to thunderbird which provides conversation view). Postler could even put postbox-inc.com out of business.

~Anil

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 07:45, anilg <email address hidden> wrote:

> In this case I vehemently posit that conversation (and not tree-
> threaded) is the "best" view for most of your average user who handles
> (replies to about 30-50) upto a hundred mails a day. There's a reason
> Gmail is so popular, and not many use pop/smtp clients to access it..
> the interface provided by the web interface is very intuitive. Collating
> similar subject mails into one makes sense usability-wise, and saves
> screen estate, that would otherwise be littered with "Re: Re:" and "Fwd:
> Re: Re:" items.
>
>
The main problem i have with conversation view in Google mail is that it
doesn't thread replies if they start with foreign abbreviations such as the
german "AW", which stands for "Antwort"
I think anilg is right and "Collating similar subject" makes sense, if the
non-prefix part of the subject name string is equal.
Similarity needs to be defined in a semantically useful way here.

I also think that the gmail option seems to be the most sensible, it is also something a large number of people are used to.

On a more general note I have been following the development of Postler for a few months now and and I love the interface. If there is no option to thread emails though, I would not use it.

Hi, I agree with Anas, with no threaded view (gmail-like), there is no big point to use postler, we have already email clients wich does the main job.

I will join the chorus in voting for a Gmail-like Conversation view. I'm also very much against a Hierarchical/Tree-like view that most mail clients provide, and which usually wastes a lot of screen, is confusing and generally not very useful.

Having used Gmail's interface for a while, now, I believe that following discussions/conversations (either personal, professional or public on mailing lists) makes sense only when all (related) e-mails under a subject (both sent and received) are grouped together in a chronological order. This saves space, simplifies and renders the e-mail list view easy to inspect. It also makes it easy to follow the flow of a thread/discussion in an intuitive manner.

The only issue that comes to mind with the Conversation view is when a message is sent to a mailing list and received back by the sender from the mailing list (mentioned in the description). However strange, it still makes sense to receive a confirmation that the sender's message was effectively distributed to the list. In my opinion this shouldn't be a blocker.

Some more design ideas:
- counts of unread, total etc. messages should happen at thread/conversation level. Suppose five unread messages in 2 different threads in Inbox, Postler should display "Inbox (2)".

Given that the bug has picked up some activity, can the postler team comment on any timeline by which dev version with conversation view would be available?

Keep in mind that user comments don't necessarily reflect active development. There is no set timelone at the moment.

Conversation view looks nice, but is pointless, as I can't tell in Mailinglists who answered who. I would vote for the 'classical' nested threading (#2). If I want conversations I can use gmail directly.

Of course this argument could revolve in a recursive loop.

- 'threads view' can indeed be used to track 'who answered who'. However,
-- in many cases this not very useful information without knowing what was answered,
-- it quickly gets untractable in discussions with many replies,
-- is fairly confusing as to when (in the discussion) a given reply happened (for example, you can have the last answer in the discussion as the third line in the thread),
-- breaks down the logical flow of the discussion since a given reply (the third one, in the example above) will often take into account other messages that happened elsewhere and are not necessarily preceding this given reply,
-- and wastes a whole lot of space in the 'email list' view.
In any case, this solution is implemented in a great deal of clients, so it is easy to choose one that suits you.

- 'conversation view' lines up all the replies in a chronological order that allows to intuitively follow the logical flow of the discussion. It allows one to tell 'who answered who' by looking at the replies themselves, and the quotes left in them.
Also, using Gmail directly is not a solution; I want to use Zoho Mail or any other IMAP service that offers similar functionality.

The issue with chronological order is in common cases where a thread mail has 2 related aspects A + B
in that case people would answer to A others to B:
{A,B}
|\
| \
A1 \
| B1
| \
| B2
A2 \
| |
A3 |
| |
A4 |
         B3

Will translated to {A,B}-> A1 -> B1 -> B2 -> A2 -> A3 -> A4 -> B3
which forces you to read every mail in the thread, even if your only interested in topic B

We do have conversations now, superseding the single-message view.

We still need a solution for Mark's valid concern with reply levels.

We still need to parse References, right now only Reply-To is used albeit it's not that bad.

On both input from someone who knows Vala and/ or Sqlite would be welcome.

Geary has a very clean style for listing out its messages and making the email inbox list compact. Can this be duplicated in Postler? I would use Geary, but they don't allow more then one account.

"I would use Geary, but they don't allow more then one account."

It seems that they do, but not from the UI [1] :
"[..]
Support for multiple email accounts
[..]
Geary 0.1 does not support multiple email accounts so if you want to add new email accounts.

The email account info is stored in ~/.local/share/geary/{yourEmailAddress}
"

Either this, or the phrases above are mangled and contradictory.

[1] http://www.ubuntugeek.com/geary-lightweight-email-reader-for-the-gnome-desktop.html