Can I disable Gmail message "threading"?

It's a wonderful feature unless you've subscribed to a mailing list with its own threading. The list puts the number of the response in the message subject, which causes gmail to completely hose threading for that list.

I find the feature absolutely MADDENING, because the main thing I use my e-mail for is recieving LJ comment notifications, and if I have a comment thread going on LJ, it groups all messages in it together, but often if there was more than one new message in that thread, it groups it with the others and I miss it, because it was below the more recent one. It drives me utterly crazy, and I'm really rather desperate for a way to turn it off.

I agree....that feature drives me nuts! Feels weird when you get back the same mail you sent from a portable like the treo 650...ugh....

Yeah, I stopped using gmail due to the threading "feature". I email the same people but about different subjects, events etc...why keep tying it to the same thread? Wildly annoying and keeps me from switching over to google for all of the other, often better features....

I hate this feature, hate it! I wish I could turn it off.

I have to say, I'd switch over to Gmail and the whole Google suite of products if it weren't for the annoying feature. I love Google stuff but won't give up the sensible - basic -"unimproved" email of Yahoo.......just allow people to turn it off for crying out loud.

I came here for any tips how to disable it.
Guess no luck.

yeah, i also searched for "gmail disable threading" and ended up here. it is truly amazing how people recommend "getting used to something" and "learn to enjoy something". a rather weak attempt to justify something imposed upon users by fascist creators of gmail. "this is a very useful feature so learn to enjoy it". period. pathetic...

I actually redirect my gmail messages to hotmail and read them in hotmail because the conversation threading completely bastardises my LJ comment notifications. What a way to ruin a great service! Why can't you turn it off?! Good lord. -__-

I'm agreeing that the 'conversations' view is helpful to some. Not all of us mentally organize that way and can't 'just get used to it'. I find it annoying and all I'm asking for is the choice to turn it on or off. Outlook offers you a bazillion and one ways to display your email - grouped by sender, week, subject, or hey, not at all. Maybe it's Gmail that should catch up with the times.

Gmail looked good until this 'conversations' gimmick feature imposed itself on my inbox. Soooo confusing to someone who's used normal email for over 20 years. Think I'll go back to paying for Yahoo Plus even though they've (equally stupidly) disabled searching for 'lost' emails in the spam folder. In this day and age, people expect a choice - especially when it wouldn't cost Google/Yahoo a penny.

help! my daughter was here, used my computer and signed up for or onto gmail.
now whenever i'm on a webpage and try to send them a note, click on the email to icon or whatever..it fires up her gmail account.
I want it to use my outlook account.
I've spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to disable this and can't.
how do I do that?
thanks for any help, lg

i agree that it's really stupid to tie together a bunch of e-mails just because they are between the same correspondents....because subjects, themes, and so forth vary and deserve their own individual tags. that being said, i still continue to use the gmail service because it is so god damn appealing otherwise. i mean...google reader, orkut, searching for my mail, and the list goes on (or perhaps i'm lazy). but either way, my point is that compared to yahoo, gmail is amazing because with yahoo i am able to place e-mails only into one category whereas with gmail i am able to tag an e-mail to several folders at once. and i suppose that the purpose/aim of the silicon valley free thinking google creators is to focus on human relationships rather than tasks, so that it is the overall correspondence that counts and not what is being talked about. social networking, the singularity, yada yada yada. i still think that they should allow you to disable the feature manually for each individual e-mail at least.

I can just agree with all above post.

I am searching for an wemail account for my mother who is not fond learning new technical stuff. Google is better than Yahoo at almost everything: more storage, better and faster spell check etc.
The missing option to turn off conversation view makes me recomend Yahoo. It is a pity.

A more personal experiance:
Just the other day I wanted to send a mail to someone I could not remember the name of, since I only had a brief conversation a few weeks ago. Since I have sent only a limited number of emails during this time I searched for it in the Sent-folder. Because of the conversation view the mail had been moved to the Inbox in order to be grouped with the response. ANNOYING and TIME CONSUMING!

I hate this feature as well. I can't make sense of it ... I find it completely non-intuitive for my own use. I can't figure out how it decides to display the messages within the conversation (most recent first, or oldest first ) - it is not consistent. Some conversations appear w/the most recent at the top, and others appear w/the most recent at the bottom.

Hi, can you please send me the procedure how to redirect the mails from Gmail account to Yahoo account.

This is a really frustrating feature. I use outlook to get my gmail because of this, but when I am on the road I am have to use the gmail GUI. I open one of these "conversations" and I am completely lost for some time until i figure out what the hell is going on. Worst case, google needs to dump this feature, best case, allow us to turn it off. Hell, I'd even pay for it.

Sometimes its good, sometimes it's bad. So give us a frickin choice already Google.

Let me give you an example of why its VERY bad. I sent out an email to 200 people (a birth announcement). Now I wanted to treat seperately the Mailer Daemon responses to real responses? But can i do that no. What happens if I filter? Well the whole conversation gets tagged.

FFS Google, Give us an option to turn it off (and handle individual messages with tags etc).

all I'm asking for is the choice to turn conversation style in gmail ON or OFF as desired by the user. when will the google pinheads understand this?

Quite simply, the potential for making an error with email as a result of the conversation view makes it unusable for anything other that reading mail. I dare not use it to send.

I use 4 other email clients and they all work the same way except google mail. Yes, google might feel that conversation view is "better", but I don't need better, I need consistency. When I use gmail, I end up making mistakes by sending replies to people - but I haven't seen that they have send me another mail while I was writing mine. It's more than annoying, it is causing mistakes.

Worse, some mail clients still add the next mail in a thread to the bottom of an email, rather than the top. If you try and communicate with someone who uses one of these, conversation view mangles the email thread beyond comprehension.

Conversations works if you use email for "chatting" idly with friends. If you use email for business on the road, for organising things or for handling your affairs, then it doesn't work.

Sure - give people the dumbed-down chatty option. But make it an OPTION! Google, if you want to convince the world that they really should get familiar with conversation view, educate, don't enforce! Come on google! We all KNOW this is just a binary switch and can be implemented very quickly! Which means your motives must be political.

Also infuriating is the way gmail takes mails which are identical or nearly identical, and groups them together with a number. If you're using gmail to receive notifications from a server, which sends you an email every 5 minutes that a hard disk is going down - you NEED to see those dozen emails!! Not a sinlge email with (12) next to it. Good grief - The postman doesn't rearrange your credit card bills for you by opening all the envelopes and putting them all into one envelope. I would like an option that tells gmail to LEAVE MY MAIL ALONE and deliver it unmolested.

I came the other way. I'm a long term yahoo user and came over to gmail because the anti-spam is superior, But after two months of use - I'm ditching gmail, because I'm forced to dumb down to use it.

I found a google suggestion page:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/

There is a tick box for the ability to switch off conversations. Maybe if enough of us do it they will listen!

I really hate this feature as well. It's so annoying opening outlook to see all of my sent messages in my inbox. Replying with the message history keeps all the information. The conversation feature is so dumb. It's especially annoying because I have a blackberry and I get my own messages back.

The worst part of message grouping? If there are one or two mails in a 20-message conversation, you can't delete the 18 useless mails and keep the 2 important mails. Your only options are to keep all 20 of them, or delete all 20 of them.

The iPhone copied this annoying "feature." It groups your SMSs in a chatbox-style thread from which you can't separate single messages.

The conversations option sucks. I agree that GMAIL needs to either turn it off, or allow us to. I am tired of hanging onto a 30 mail group to save one email, and trying to find current emails that are buried because they are resurrected from an old threaded conversation. GMAIL is excellent except for the threading. Lose it or lose me. I haven't started looking for another email address yet because I just finally got my friends here. But it is coming very soon. I will certainly miss having Google exclusively in my portfolio. Better than my paid service for all other options.

The threading FEATURE IF FROM HELL! I HATE IT SOOOOO MUCH because it is soooo annoying. So annoying that I have finally decided to give up gmail. I hope they'll listen.

Someone should show this page to the gmail developers. Maybe they'll get the hint...

I don't know what you are all talking about. This feature is great and helps keep the inbox organized! It doesn't even group everything from the same sender like some people are saying, only messages that are a direct reply to one of your other messages, maybe it would be nice to delete single messages for some people :S but you have 5gb of storage so... why?

I've tried to 3 months to get used to it. I'm going back to yahoo mail.

Another hater here. This feature is cr*p. I can't believe there's no way to turn it off.

For now I'm using an IMAP client, Thunderbird, and I never miss their horrid web interface.

change the subject each time to avoid it being threaded. simple!

Turning threading on/off would be really helpful, as everyone could set it according to one's needs.

Google should listen to people and let them turn threading off

I agree. Threading is a hugely annoying feature - especially when you check messages on multiple devices. I may have looked at a message on outlook on my PC and then when on the run see the same message, highlighted, on my blackberry and choose to ignore it because i've already read it on my pc. Later, when I go back to my pc, I see that many people have responded to the message and I didn't know that because i literally have to open the message in my blackberry to see if there have been any responses. VERY ANNOYING. I guess I should just use the blackberry email application, but there are many other features(for example using the gmail app i have access to all my old emails and also the ability to search through them) that i like. i really wish that google would get rid of this feature. i feel that i am stuck with google though because it has been my experience that they have the absolute best spam filters and i get TONS of spam otherwise.

I can't tell you how much frustrating it was for
me to deal with conversation view that I went
back to good old yahoo mail with classic interface.

May be it is just me!

I always seem to understand the context better
when I view the events in the order in which they
happened!

[Lets say 4-5 persons are in a conversation.
And one of the conversation member sends me a
personal mail on a different topic.

In this scenario, time line View (chronological
view) of the Inbox makes me understand better on
why people say the things they say.

This is not a special case.
It happens to me so often that Chronological view
is so critical for me.

I have to concur with some of the above comments - the argument to 'get used to it' is pretty weak. For some it is useful, for others not. I personally can't stand it but all I would like is the option to disable it. A good portion of my email is worthy of deletion within a week or two. The way it's set up now, either I have to save the entire conversation or open up the conversation, delete what portions of it I can, then save it. Either way, since when did a good search feature become an excuse to keep old messages you clearly don't want or need? Searching takes a lot longer when you have to wade through the same crap over and over again?

I've totally concur - ive had to ditch Gmail apps JUST BECAUSE of this - if Google is serious about making inroads in the buisness market they better fix this insanity now!!!!

Threading is a crap !!
I wish I could switch it off. More over google could give us more options in settings dialog.
Forexample posibility to change order of main row columns (subject, message body, email sender).

Hello everyone. I have to concur with you all that the threading feature in gmail should be optional and not imposed. As Mark suggested earlier, there is the Gmail Help Center where you can suggest feature changes for gmail. There is the option of Switching Conversation View ("Threading") on or off.

Please go to the website and vote for this feature change.
https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/

If enough of us vote for this change we should soon be getting rid of the threading nightmare.

Cheers.

I use email as a sales tool and many emails have the same subject line but are NOT the same conversation, so Gmail is totally useless to me without a way to turn off the "conversations" feature.

Tim

I have a secretary service send me a message any time they take a message for me. They send it using the same email address and subject. They all end up in the same "thread" and it is killing me. (there are a lot of other examples too - this is just a recent one)
Anybody who says...
"change the subject each time to avoid it being threaded. simple!"
... is not reading any of the other comments on this page.