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.

This converstation threading is absolutely diabolical. I live in constant fear of replying to the wrong people, missing a response to an email (as it lumps 200 responses from 1 group email into the same thread), missing a hardware failure notification etc.
I find it totally unmanageable, even after 6 months of persevering with it. The old standard interface is 1 million times better for me.

Put me down as one who in the "I HATE THREADED CONVERSATIONS" camp. It's annoying, confusing, things get missed. I end up reading the same emails over and over and over as I search mindlessly for the one or two emails that have been added to the conversation. Next thing you know, a new conversation is started, and the madness is compounded.

I started using the comcast email account that came with ISP, and right off the bat I started replying to emails in a way that I am comfortable with.

I understand that Gmail is a free service, but please, give us this option. Please.

I love EVERYTHING else about Gmail. Spam filtering, picture review, composing mail... but this nonsense with the conversations is insanity.

I hate this converstation threading. Do we have a solution from Goooooogle?

This lack of feature needs to be addressed immediately.

My particular problem is that it tries to group very similar messages, which are not, in fact, a conversation, into a conversation. Very unhelpful, and very annoying.

Note to Google gmail designers and software designers everywhere: it's when you try to do too much thinking on behalf of your users that they start to hate you.

Automation is awesome, and it's what computing is all about, but there should always be a way to disable The Most Clever Feature In The World.

FixNowPlz!

After more than 4 months of quantifiably vast productivity loses and costly employee errors across the board, I'm forced to recommend a switch back from Google Apps for our entire enterprise. It was time-consuming and frustrating to implement at a desktop / server / mobile level for everyone, and I hung in there thinking that this would change. It hasn't, and we're bleeding from it.

I can only assume that Google believes its sheer weight will tip the scale in favor of what is so obviously a financially and marketing driven decision. Gmail was a desktop point of entry and a critical opportunity for them. All of which has been laid low by a few poorly designed features and an unwillingness to change before the tipping point was reached.

What a shame – a company which was once so wonderfully innovative and pledged to do no harm has taken to bullying and ignoring consumers and resting on its laurels. The Masters of the Information Universe might want to have a "conversation" of their own. They could have a panel discussion about how that same once-ironclad strategy has paid off for Microsoft in the last couple of years.

Google it.

THREADING. PAH! Does my head in!!

Lotus Notes - Just about one of the worst mail templates EVER has a simple on/off setting for mail threading in the new release 8 version. Why can't GMAIL ?

I have to agree with the masses. The conversation system sucks.

Make sure you suggest they dump it or at least let us turn it off here:

https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/

lol at gmail being fascist for providing a free email client.

My wife, who sends and receives email digests and responses to mass mailings hates this feature. However, for all those who consider Yahoo mail a viable alternative, I wouldn't trust it. I have a Yahoo account, I tried it before switching to Gmail. I've had email I've sent not arrive and email I've been sent not arrive, nothing to do with settings, blocking, filters or anything like that. Just plain old email to and from friends and then email to and from myself as a test. This, for me is a total deal-breaker. I'm not alone, see this for example: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080815131104AAWwvq0
Is there a reasonably reliable and user-friendly alternative to Gmail and Yahoo? Certainly not Hotmail.

All you have to do is create a filter from the sender "_YOUR NAME_" to skip inbox and archive or delete.

It works for me!

I face the same problem with our company email, it's quite frustrating and doesn't work naturally. Atlease for us!

Yep, the message Threading / grouping is pathetic, it is extremely hard to manage emails. I just creates a cluttered looking bunch of mail.

Another problem with the conversation view is that when using labels (folders) to store messages, it groups messages across labels (folders) into the same conversation. So even when you take the time to label everything correctly to keep my mail organized, it automatically groups messages together that are completely unrelated.

Really annoying!

Love Google stuff, ABSOLUTELY HATE the "threading feature"!!!!!!
I've been waiting for couple of years for the to give an option of turning it off, but it's still there....
The only reason I'm still with Gmail, because I use Outlook to receive/send and read my Gmail....

threading sucks

I have been using gmail for some time and have always enjoyed the conversation feature. Today I wanted to see all my emails in order so I can find when I did something. Well I can't do that because of the stupid conversation thing. Why can't they just make it so you can turn it off when you need it off and then turn it back on. For my day to day emails it is quite useful.

The feature of grouping the "conversations" is extremely ANNOYING because I never know which e-mail I am actually reading. If I wish to forward the original e-mail with attachments, the I am never sure if I forwarded that message or some other in the chain. And that stupid "me, others" in the title is misleading. I use gmail because it is integrated with documents and it has superior search, but the organisation with all these labels is terrible. Hotmail is much better in that regard.

Gmail conversations are REALLY annoying (and so is Dave Taylor)

just my opinion delete it if you want, like the last opinion I had.

Thanks for stopping by, Muksil, but generally I don't tolerate people being rude in comments, whether it's to me or to someone else on the site. Just FYI.

I tried to get used to the damn gmail threading but it is the most STUPIDLY infexible scheme imagable. Even the search "of all things" is poor.

I have gone back to aol because (1) when i want to look at mail chronologically i can't do it in gm, (2) when i want to separate a message and reply its a total stinker to do and (3) when I want to see in a simple chrono view what correspondance i have had with jon doe i cant do it.

Getting used to it doesnt work -- it stinks. Imagine going back to aol of all things

It seems so Microsofty for Google to FORCE you to use features that a few deem to be "so darn useful"

My vote is for a "Dont thread conversations" option and even a "remove this from conversation" button for individual emails a person may want to target or segregate.

Question: When is a "feature" an annoyance?
Answer: When it's NOT OPTIONAL!

Must say that I hate the threading feature as well. I'm in the middle of organising a recruitment for a new headteacher: I'm away from home so am not downloading via Outlook and have now found that I've missed half the emails to me because they were placed in a thread. Can't believe that Google have had this for over two years without the ability to turn it off.

Hate it! Hate it! Hate it!

If the way gmail organizes conversations is considered a "feature", I must be missing something. I forward messages I receive at another address. Gmail lumps forwarded messages together in some almost random fashion even from different senders. These are in no way "conversations". Since not all messages forwarded from this server are lumped together, it seems that gmail is using some strange algorithm for parsing "similarity" based on factors other than the email address of the original sender. Once a "conversation" is established, there is no way to break it apart into separate conversations.

Also, grouping all messages from a given correspondent might be OK (assuming that actually happened), but one would certainly like to be able to delete part of that "history", without deleting the whole conversation.

Overall, this "feature" was clearly not well thought out or simply poorly implemented.

"I suggest instead that you might spend a few weeks trying to get used to it."

Yea. I have few weeks to try to get used to it.
Thank you very much, industry guru Dave Taylor!!!!!!!!

I had a suggestion for you, industry guru Dave Taylor. But you promptly deleted it from this conversation.

Please don't patronize your visitors.

Al, the comment I deleted from you said "You suck!" and that's all you said, after quoting my comment about getting used to Gmail threading because there's no way to turn it off. Is that your definition of a "suggestion" and a contribution to the discussion, Al? Then no last name and a bogus email address when you leave a comment? I'd love to have you leave useful and interesting commentary, but so far, you haven't done so.

The threading in gmail is the worst in any mail application I have ever used. Mails should not be grouped just because they share the same subject. Some people do not set the subejcts correctly, which has caused me lot of irritation and made me miss mails.

For notifcations from system monitoring it is vital that the mails can be sorted in chronooligical order.

I do not recommend using gmail in a professional environment due to this threading.

You are right, Dave, I have no constructive suggestion for this problem. That is exactly what pisses me off. Google does not even want to admit that it is a problem for many users. Or that they are working to make the threading an option. They just say that "others like it", putting me in position to take it or leave it. I am switching to a different email provider.

I just wanted to explain why seeing comments like "get used to it" is so maddening. Sorry for my angry outburst.

Al.

It is funny that this conversation has been going on for 3 years and most of the people are saying the same thing "Give us the option to turn off conversations". I also hate it. I prefer the structure of Yahoo. But Yahoo's email system is so unreliable.

I have my email forwarded to both a Gmail and a Yahoo account. The emails arrive faster at Gmail. I have few technical problems with Gmail. Yahoo has so many "temporary problems". I hate it. But I can not get used to the Gmail "conversations".

If Gmail ever allows the feature to turn off conversations, I would switch in a minute.

Even if they kept the features, but allowed the conversations to be sorted by when the last email to that group was received, it would be fine. This way you don't have to look 3 pages down to find an email from a freind you wrote to 3 weeks ago and just replied to it. I may be doing something wrong, but I miss a ton of emails if I can't view things by date received!!! Anyone know if there is a way to do that at least? Any ideas???

Use Thunderbird and use Gmail free POP access to get mail into Thunderbird. There you can select your view - conversation or otherwise.

Some people use multiple computers to access email.
In this case local email client is not an option.

threading is sooooooooooooooooooo irratitating it should be up to g mail to decide i want to group messages.
It makes it so much harder to find e mails and dont tell me to get used to it because I have had g mail for a long time and i will never like this feature.

Several times I had to shuffle the cards to figure out if I have replied to an important email and failed! This conversation threading is not a feature, it is a scoff.

I came here to figure out how to display this stupid feature. It's awful!!! gmail in unusable. If you send and recieve lots of emails, you just cant use it.

Google knows search, and not much else. Theres a reason 98% of their profit remains search, they can't do anything else right.

Following up on the objection to using local email client, you can use IMAP. That way, you can still use multiple computers.

For 2 years I have used pathetic Gmail for shopping, etc. to keep my primary email (Yahoo) free from spam. So, as for "time" helping you get "used to it," no... you don't get used to it. I hated that feature day one and I hate it now. I also hate that "label" thing and "archiving" which further confuses things. Since Yahoo doesn't have IMAP I am struggling syncing my Blackberry with Yahoo through Outlook. I can't seem to win this fight.

The answer here is simple, I say simple because you folks that "hate" the smart threading are obviously too simple minded. The answer: stop using gmail and go away so the MILLIONS of happy gmail users can have peace.

p.s. dave rules! But it looks like he is getting the Torches and PitchForks from the small mob here, sorry Dave.

gmail pro since '04

How to Delete a message from a Conversation

Sometimes, however, deleting entire conversations in one swoop may not be what you want. What if there's a particular message that is really not worthy of belonging to that conversation? What if Gmail has lumped together a messages that don't go together well, some of them ripe for deletion?
Delete an Individual Message in Gmail

To delete just one message (even from a conversation) in Gmail:

* Open the conversation that contains the message you want to delete.
* Expand the desired message.
* Click the down arrow next to Reply in the message's title bar.
- If you see no Reply and no arrow, click More Options.
* Select Delete this message.

I can't see how its confusing or hard to use in any scenario honestly, click on a the threaded correspondence it expands. Dave has shown in this post how a single click can expand all. One simple click how is this confusing or complicated?

Moreover it just makes sense, it is still behaving like you expect showing you the most recent message first, only grouped by subject, allowing it to be far more efficient and concise about the process.

How?

It eliminates the trap where emailing becomes pointlessly forwarding and re-forwarding the same thing over and over plus a single sentence, or someone forwarding only part of the message and you having to go back and figure out what was accidentally or deliberately missed.

Its simplicity aside, you can search and sort in so many different ways in gmail no matter how you prefer it taking the time to just use the search feature will allow you to emulate any email services display to your taste.

I just see a great feature and lack of an open mind to embrace it or laziness getting in the way here, and its kinda sad.

-Zig

I found this reply by Dave to be terribly arrogant and part of the reason why people get so frustrated with computer and software. Dave, it might be convenient and work well for YOU but not for everyone. I HATE this "feature" and found this blog whilst searching for a way to turn off conversations in gmail. Clearly, it's not all that wonderful for everyone.

Options are ALWAYS better than forcing people to organize their information in a certain way.

It's tempting to read through the comments and think that the general sense of the gmail user community is that this feature is bad. But since most people report having arrived here by Googling on something like disable gmail threading, there's a massive selection bias. 99% of people who enter that term, and therefore 99% of people who land on this page, already hate the threading feature.

Personally, I think the feature is awesome and intuitive. There are certainly valid reasons why someone might *not* like it, but even more valid reasons why offering both options is not practical for Google. Conversations are the backbone of virtually everything they do. Offering GMail in a non-conversation mode would be more like offering 2 different services than toggling a feature on and off.

Thankfully, if there are 1,000,000 email providers out there, there are 999,999 who offer non-threaded messaging, so there's plenty to choose from. It's worth noting that the one that offers this feature set, and has since its launch, also grew larger faster than any (almost any?) of the other 999,999. So someone other than me must like it. :-)

Large part of gmail users do not want conversation threading. Outlook ot Thunderbird IMAP is not an option for those who need web mail access from multiple computers.

Yet Google refuses to make it an option.

To turn it OFF or ON.

We are not stuck with Goolag, are we?

What web mail besides gmail you like?

Google desided we should get used to it.
Take it or leave it.

Well, vote with your legs, people.

In my opinion Gmail through Outlook looked like a train wreck due to the conversation feature and the labels. Plus is was slow. Yahoo was much better but it has no IMAP capability making things a bit harder (but not impossible) if you want to sync multiple devices accessing Yahoo. AOL has IMAP and was far faster than Gmail but no SSL enabled. There is "choice" out there... but from what I have experienced there is something lacking from each company.

I don't quite understand the anger though... what works for one might not for another. Someone is not lazy or stupid because they like the interface to look or act differently than someone else.

I believe one of the main reasons Gmail cleaned up is not its conversation feature but its IMAP capability - if Yahoo gets IMAP they would be capable of meeting all my email needs. I wish "somebody" would meet them and I really don't care what company it ends up being...

I was a big user and supporter of the google products. I assumed from all the hype they had thought things through and were cool thinkers. But they are just wrong with this. And wrong to not allow sub-folders (please lord don't let anyone come back and say I just have to get used to "labels"). Changing things like this is like telling people to get used to cars with the gas pedal on the steering wheel. It's going too far. Threading/conversations have gotten me into trouble once too many times. - think I am done w the gmail experiment. I would bet they will one day relent but probably will take years...

I hate this feature so much. I think that it is totally confusing and useless. And it should be an option to turn it off. Unfortunately I have to give up gmail as my main mail account because of this.

Who would push everybody into such ugly, though useful sometimes, gmail threading feature? Nobody would insist on such crap if saw how old people look up the email address using the "Re" button. It causes their letters appear in the arbitrary "conversations". This is how I missed a very important message. I imagine a group if inventors of this feature and their friends which constantly praise each other. All legends must end sometime and Google is not an exception.

This is the feature from hell. Yes sometimes it is very elegant but other times it drives me crazy. For example my phone company mails me a sound file when someone leave a voice mail. They are have the same subject and google groups them all together. So the message that grandma left a month ago get grouped with the message my boss left this morning.

AAARRRRGGG !!!!!

Just get used to it?
Sure...like I'll get used to the dentist's drill.
If I have to spend weeks getting used to something then it tells me my initial impression is correct:
Conversations "feature" sucks a big one.

Yukkkkkkk.

P.S. I'm happy to see I'm not the only one.

This feature is more confusing than being helpful.. esp if one sends mail to same person on different subjects... Should be on/off for this feature.. soem may like.. some may not...

Hello everybody, I absolutely hate the "message threading" feature in Gmail. It may work for others, but for me is very confusing. Gmail should offer a preference to deactivate it...

I agree with most of the comments on here. Gmail threading is a total mess. It's just totally annoying and absolutely useless to organize emails this way. One major thing is if you send an email to a group of addresses and one gets sent back, and another person replies, both the "delivery failure" email and your emails with the person who responded are lumped into the same conversation...totally lame!

Another thing...Forwarding an email to somebody! That forwarded email now gets lumped into an entire string of emails what you sent. It's absolutely nuts! Just organize my emails by date sent PLEASE!! and don't lump my forwarded and responded emails with my received emails and delivery failure emails. This Gmail feature is a total waste of time.

Another thing, god forbid you use Outlook for your Gmail emails....Your sent emails sometimes end up getting put into your INBOX in Outlook.

I hate the 'conversation' feature too! I use Outlook to check my gmail account from home because the threading feature has made me incorrectly include people in replies or forwards that I did not want to include and I just can't take that chance -- I only send New mail when checking gmail online, otherwise it's all from outlook -- what a waste because of one bad unchangable irritating feature! please listen up, gmail and just give us the choice

Dave probably lots of people have said this already, but conversation view just doesn't do the job it's supposed to. It both splits up real conversations can combines them incorrectly. I could live whith this for new mail, but it becomes almost impossible to use when you are reviewing old conversations of say a few months ago. It's plain wrong. Everything else about gmail is very good so I still use it as a search tool (Outlook it practically incapable of searching)

PS I have never met a computer-literate person who likes Conversation View (except on bull boards). It eliminates one of computings basic tools - SORT

"I suggest instead that you might spend a few weeks trying to get used to it. Once you're comfortable with it, I think you'll find it a very elegant way to keep track of your email discussions."

That's like saying "Spanish is such a wonderful language that, if you don't like the fact that our website is written only in Spanish, you should try learning Spanish before you complain." Spanish really IS a wonderful language, but anyone who wants me to use their website needs to put up English version.

I've created a petition to fix this:

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/gmail911

Put me on the list of people who hate this feature. I've been wanting to switch to gmail for years but won't do it because of the conversation mode. Now I need a webmail and I'm going to have to pick yahoo or something. I can't believe there is no option to turn this off.

I came here trying to find out how to disable email grouping in Gmail, but see now that there is no solution. I need to view all my emails to a person chronologically so I can reconstruct how a decision was reached, but of course Gmail won't let me sort by date alone. It's so stupid! I have had a Yahoo email account as well for many years, and, starting now, am going to use it exclusively.

I guess the best solution is using the IMAP features to ex. Mac Mail. That works great - also the integration to gmail.

I hate gmail's threading/conversation. I have missed so many emails because of it, but i need gmail for all the other google products. I wish you can just use traditional email set-up. Just let the email come into my inbox. I hope some one at google on the 20% creative time, comes up with a hack or google lab option.

Threading SUCKS. I have lost a number of important contacts by supposedly deleting one conversation, only to lose it ALL. Eg: If you want to save a copy of a sent message, but delete, say an undeliverable notification from your inbox, you ALSO LOSE the copy from your SENT file!! More cocky 'innovation' where none was necessary from the Google 'geniuses.' DO NO EVIL.

I hate gmail threadnig. It SUCKS!!!

I certainly would have thought by now that Google would have made this an "option". I'm sorely disappointed that they have not. I too am on gmail's "threading/conversation" hate train. Can't stand it. I understand fully well that some do... heck, maybe even most do. Google, with all due respect, please make this a 'turn-on' or 'turn-off' function. Please.

I appreciate the intent of this feature, but the paradigm solves a problem I don't have and creates several others in the process. The official response above has a somewhat patronizing tone that Google knows what I want better than I do. Google needs to be careful of making the same mistake as other Silicon Valley companies who started to believe they could ignore their users and get away with it. Either give me the option to view my messages in a format that I and many other people seem comfortable with or I'm sure we can find some other company that does.

The conversation view is horror for me. Since there are haters and lovers I fail to understand why Google does not make this into an option.

It sounds simple, just provid a possibility to sort the messages by date.

Good grief... these comments have been gathering here for more than 3 years, and this "bug" (it's not a feature when you hate it) still isn't fixed. I came here looking for a way to disable the conversation view but find that I can't.

This means that a gmail replacement is in order for me, too!

Agree.Agree. Agree.
We use Gmail for receiving emails from contact forms. All from different people about different things but jumbled up together as a single conversation. The only hope is that a disable option seems to be a popular request on the select a feature page for Gmail. To make your views made directly to the Gmail team go into Gmail and then Gmail Help then About Contacting Support (at bottom) then Send us suggestions for future features. Lets hope the squeaky wheel gets the grease!

Wow - gotta love the answer - use it for a few weeks and get used to it?

So do it the Google way or leave? I'll leave thank you very much and go to a proper email provider who will let you read your mails as they were sent and not messed about with.

Google trying to re-invent email? give me a break....

Looks like it is not going to be fixed. This thread has been going on now for as long as I can remember. It is a shame, but I have decided to move to another service where I can simply just receive my emails in chronological order. Anyone got any suggestions (apart from Outlook)? Since I travel a lot, I need to access my email over the web. I can't believe that Google are being so arrogant about this. You would normally expect that sort of arrogance from the crowd in Redmond, Washington.

Can Google PLEASE just make conversation view an option???

Yeah, the conversation view is really, really bad! I'm going to request unthreaded e-mail at:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/st...
as reported earlier in this thread. But I can only imagine how many people have done that and the problem never gets fixed after years and years. I know I showed my sister gmail and she hated conversation view too... I'm sure there are tons of people who have just accepted the fate of the Gestapo Google..

Obviously, CONVERSATION VIEW SHOULD BE OPTIONAL! There are many cases where OBVIOUSLY conversation view is not the best solution. Just like Chrome, Google feels a need to limit our options to make things simpler and more user friendly. I actually do agree with making things as simple and user friendly as possible but look at this huge thread here. Google is forcing everyone into a more complicated and less user friendly world through their own arrogance and a mandatory conversation view!

Now, if Google is so unbelievably stubborn with something this freakin' OBVIOUS and simple to change, imagine how much of a control freak they will be if they actually start making a real operating system. Or get any more power than they already have!! OBVIOUSLY GOOGLE IS INCOMPETENT!!! It's too bad we all depend on Google so much for search. And just think, with all the searching we do, they probably have a pretty good database of all of us. Omniscient power to the Control Freaks!!!

Just imagine if real mail worked like conversation view. Who needs real mail coming in chronologically each day in a mailbox. I mean, if your mom sends you a physical piece of mail, it should just appear immediately next to any other letters your mom sent you over the years in some filing cabinet. Instead of checking your mailbox to see if she sent you something recently, you should be going through every file in your filing cabinet to see which people actually sent you something that day. Yeah, Google, you've really got this one figured out.

Isn't it nice to get mail chronologically? Like a breath of fresh air really.

Mr. Big Boss Man arrives at the office. He's quite meticulous and always likes to examine the mail the post man delivers each day.

Mr. Boss Man
(to his secretary)
Where is my mail? You usually place the new mail on my desk in the morning!

Secretary Gaggle
I've thought of a better way Mr. Boss Man.
I filed all of it away in our file cabinets.

Mr. Boss Man
What? Was there nothing important in it?

Secretary Gaggle
No, there seemed to be a lot of important stuff. But I thought I’d just file it away to save time later on.

Mr. Boss Man
Our filing cabinets are filled with year’s worth of archives. How am I supposed to find the stuff that just came in?

Secretary Gaggle
Oh, I put a little mark on every piece of mail. Just pull out all the folders and look for the bold mark. I’m sure you find most of it. The good news is that it’s already been filed so now you don’t even have to see it!! Look how clean your desk is!!!

Mr. Boss man gets up and opens a filing cabinet. He flips through some folders trying to find some of the recent mail.

Mr. Boss Man
How am I supposed to find any of my mail. Do you remember any of it?

Secretary Gaggle
Well, just ask me... I can help you search.

Mr. Boss Man
Ok. Did that customer Ms. Henkin send any mail? I was expecting something from her.

Secretary Gaggle
Oh, yeah. I think she did. But I didn’t put it under her file name because she was asking about our new product. So I filed it under the “new product” folder.

Mr. Boss Man
This is ridiculous!!! How am I supposed to find ANYTHING!

Secretary Gaggle
No really, my new system is much better...

Mr. Boss Man
What about Mr. Mucker? You know he’s sending an important business letter.

Secretary Gaggle
I don’t think he sent anything. Let me check his file. (She finds an envelope) Oh. Yeah, I guess he did. Here’s the whole file on him - I’m absolutely sure you’ll probably need to see everything he’s ever written to you... There... See? I can help you search for anything you ask me about. Sometimes I amaze myself how totally efficient I am. I’m so quick I filed all the mail before anyone even had to bother reading it!! Everything is great!!

Mr. Boss Man
Can you please just find everything that came in the mail today and give it to me? I ONLY WANT THE STUFF FROM TODAY!!!!

Secretary Gaggle
No! My mind doesn’t work like that. You need to jog my memory with keywords or something. Then maybe I can try to pull the related files. I hope I sorted it all correctly – I’m sure I did. Anyways, if we miss a few letters, I’m sure it’ll be alright.

Mr. Boss Man
You’re FIRED!

Mr. Boss Man was unable to find a couple very important letters which happened to come in the mail that day. One very timely letter sat in the filing cabinet until well after the court proceedings. Luckily, Mr. Boss Man only lost his business and his home. It’s too bad Secretary Gaggle was so incompetent but Mr. Boss Man will just have to deal with it. That’s life.

-------

The craziest part is that this is basically a true story – FOR EVERYONE WHO USES G-MAIL!!!

I still simply do not comprehend HOW Google can not see how OBVIOUS this problem really is. I mean this is a major issue that anyone from any perspective can easily see that GOOGLE IS IN THE WRONG HERE. Sorting mail by date is an ESSENTIAL FEATURE of a MAIL PROGRAM. I really don’t understand how anyone can even bother defending Google in this... I mean – yeah, they have “Search” – but so what?? Search is not SORT as the above dialogue expresses. Threaded conversations is a nice feature – for a very specific function only. IT SHOULD BE OPTIONAL!

I guess the really upsetting part is not so much that Google is clearly incompetent. Everyone make mistakes. It’s that when I search online about this topic, I find plenty of threads with LOTS of people all bitterly complaining that this is a problem. So Google KNOWS this is a major problem and refuses to fix it. The question is why? Why be EVIL? Power trip? They honestly think they are correct and only allowing threaded conversations will teach us all the errors of our ways? What’s the deal? It’s been years and this hasn’t been fixed... Why?

I never understood why people do evil things. The one satisfying bit to all of this is that eventually – at some point in the future, UNTHREADED SORT BY DATE will – I repeat – WILL be added into G-mail. Why do I say this? Because it is OBVIOUS. Anyone with half a brain can see that humans communicate FIRST in TIME and only then by SUBJECT. Think about that. It’s a fundamental aspect of the laws of physics of the universe. And Google is perverting those laws and trying to bend them to their will. But it can’t last forever and therefore I can safely predict this will change to reflect the way nature fundamentally works.

I can only hope someone at Google can read this and the feature will be added sooner than later. The longer they refuse to address such a fundamental flaw just shows how stubborn and arrogant they really are. And once this problem is finally fixed, the world will be ever so slightly better for a few hundred million people.

By the way, if anyone wants to make the above joke dialogue into a fun filled YouTube Video, it’s the kind of inside joke that might get some hits and push this thing forward a bit more.

And when I say Google is Evil – well – I realize they aren’t really as bad as the Monsanto’s of the world. But why do they refuse to listen to anyone or actually many many people as the case may be?? Actions by large powerful corporations are clearly very mysterious... or nefarious...

i would like to ad my voice to those on here who detest gmail grouping/threading.

i can see what they have tried to accomplish. unfortunately, the results are in mind less than satisfying.

it's a mess and for too many reasons. Sometimes people write but do not bother to change the subject line and their mail gets included with a conversation where it doesn't belong, and if within that thread there is a lot activity it won't stand out.

furthermore, i want to be able to delete most of the mail whilst at the same time keep my sent one. with the grouping/threading system that doesn't seem to be possible. if A writes to me and i answer back, if i delete A's message i will delete my answer with it..

and the list goes on and on.

i'm seriously reconsidering my choice of moving away from yahoo something which i did only because they had announced the sale to microsoft.

Sorry Dave, but you really dropped the ball on this one.

Sure, conversations are great, wonderful even. In general, I really like the feature. But not for everyone, all the time.

I run an online store, which gets a lot of email. Generally, I tell if I replied to a message by looking for the (2) next to it.

Except sometimes, it groups totally unrelated conversations together into one conversation. So it will say (2), and it's not Bob and Sasha's reply - But rather Bob and Jon. Thinking someone else at the shop answered it, I skip over it. Oops. Now both Bob and Jon are pissed off because they never got an answer.

Why in the high hell does it group together unrelated conversations? What do I do if I want to unlink them? There's simply no way. The conversations with Bob and Jon will simply be stuck to each other in a goopy ball for good. Useless.

No option to disable it. No option to unlink individual emails from conversation threads. No good, Google.

I am incredibly upset at my decision to base my business on Gmail right now. I've given it months, but it just doesn't work for my needs.

I think that Gmail was premature in leaving "Beta" status...

Sasha

I would like to agree with the masses here and let Dave know that he is completely wrong on this one. Does he work for Google or something? Even if you PERSONALLY like this feature, it is abundently clear that MANY MANY MANY people HATE it, so why not just offer the option to turn it off? - simple. Add me to the list of people who left gmail for this reason alone. So annoying!

Holy moly, I leave this thread alone for a while and it garners a ton of hostile and critical comments! Though I initially said that I thought people who didn't like the Gmail threading feature should just "give it time" and "get used to it", I will now say that it's clear there are lots and lots of people who have a stronger negative reaction to it and that it is absolutely in Google's best interest for them to change message threading to a user option.

This "feature" makes me lose e-mails! Why can't they make it an option? If it's so good, why are they afraid to allow people to turn it off?

Another user here thinking of switching back to Yahoo after using G-mail for a couple of months. How I hate that threading feature.

I just notified my entire address book that I was switching to gmail :( Unfortunately I did not realize how annoying this feature is. Even more annoying is the google attitude - it boggles my mind that there is no way to disable this feature

I just became a Gmail fan until I started consolidating other email accounts into the new gmail account. I have already lost track of so many of the emails because many of them happen to have the same subject line. This is absolutely ridiculous. What is so difficult about making this threading garbage optional? Now I'm going to have to take all the emails I had just switched over and put them into yet another Yahoo account because I am leaving Gmail. This feature is the most annoying thing I have ever encountered in my 13 years of having email accounts.

And this Dave guy can criticize whomever he likes about people not being intelligent enough to appreciate this nonsense. He needs to realize that there are many people out there that simply don't want their emails organized that way. It has nothing to do with comprehension. I understand it perfectly, but I HATE it. I don't want emails (that are totally unrelated) from several different people clumped together simply because they have the same subject line.

This past summer I was away from home and unable to get my Comcast mail through the firewall where I was staying. So I set up a gmail account and forwarded all of my other mail accounts there. At first glance I was impressed with the great SPAM filtering and the ability to tag and create labels and filters -- very robust features for an online mail client.

But after about 4 months, I've decided to ditch the gmail because I simply cannot get used to the threading. It is the most annoying, counter-intuitive mail organization scheme I've ever encountered -- and I even subscribe to several newsgroups where conversation threading is standard, but what works for one purpose, definitely does not work for another, in my opinion.

I constantly miss messages and reply incorrectly. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to include only the most current message out of a thread with my reply -- it seems to be include the whole dang thread or nothing at all, which is insane -- when forwarding I often do not care for the person I am forwarding to to see the entire conversation I had with the message sender before the part I want to share. Not to mention, when sending replies to group messages, including the whole thread is a PIA and clutters other people's inboxes with unnecessary crap they've already read, but yet replying without reference of the message you are replying to often does not provide needed information. Wading through threads on a hand-held mail reader (i.e. Blackberry) to find the "new" pieces is complicated and time-consuming, especially if there are multiple people involved in the conversation and there have been several replies. How silly and inefficient when people are continually bouncing the same multi-page message thread back and forth just to add a one-sentence reply.

As previously stated, not having the ability to look through my mail chronologically is madness and has cost me countless hours trying to track down something I remembered receiving in June, but is actually buried with the August email because of an after-thought comment /reply somebody sent months after the original email.

It is not a matter of intelligence or comprehension, rather organization. Different people process and organize in different ways (and from the sounds of this thread -- a good many people do not subscribe to Google's method of organization). What a shame that there is no choice to turn this "feature" on or off in this otherwise very functional online email client.

This is a good feature for reading mail, but it is just terrible in a work environment. You just get lost all the time because Gmail keeps hiding people's names. I'm trying to get used to it but I might as well enable IMAP and download my messages to Microsoft Outlook just to get rid of this feature.

I don't see what would be the problem to just make it an option, so you can freely choose how you want to view your e-mail: like everyone else, or like Google wants.

Gmail was so highly recommended to me, but I am abandoning it because of this lame "conversation" feature.

Case in point: I sent an important proposal to the head of the large company I work for. Got a response from him, which I forwarded to another party who was helping me with the proposal. He replied back, and suddenly his reply is an immutable part of this email thread. Why does Gmail insist on daisy chaining these emails together? We could not figure out how to separate the forward/reply from the original email, so we had to abandon the email and start with a fresh one.

I was appalled by this -- I can't believe Gmail thinks this is desirable. I've mentioned it to many Gmail enthusiasts, whose response was that you can bypass that feature through preferences, but I certainly can't find a way to do it. Life's too short -- I'm moving on.

Gmail SUCKS. Back to Yahoo for me.

Yeah, I don't see how it benefits google in any way not to just give the OPTION to turn this off. Even have it be on by default and the switch to turn it off hidden away someplace no one would ever find by accident and with a bunch of "are you sure?" "really?" "REEEEEEEEEALLY?" "Okay but don't blame us if you regret it, okay?" confirmation prompts.

It's not like it will harm people who like "conversations" if other people have a chance to turn it off, why not allow it and please everyone?

I have to agree 100% that this "feature" really should be optional. If there's this level of annoyance at it, it doesn't say much for Google's flexibility that this much frustration over this length of time has done nothing to persuade them. And to have the option to just sort all emails chronologically (perhaps from one contact - using labels?) is what I really need, and don't have. Gmail mixes up the order due to correspondents not always replying to your latest email. The really stupid thing is that surely what people here are asking for is actually the no-brainer, hardly any progamming required option - I can't see any way that this would be difficult to implement! They just can't be bothered...
I've resorted to using IMAP and Thunderbird to see all correspondence to and from one email address, in date order. At least now it's possible for me!

We've just gone over to gmail at work, with no option to use a local client: it's webmail or nothing. Not being able to turn off threading is The. Most. Annoying. Thing. Ever. "Get used to it" is not an appropriate response.

I had a gmail account way back in the day of invite-only betas. I abandoned it very quickly because I couldn't get on with threading. It's great for some people and there are many good things about the Google way of doing things. Not offering a simple on/off button for a very idiosyncratic way of viewing and managing email seems like an oversight at best and a postively arrogant disregard for how individuals might prefer to handle their information at worst.

I hope someone at Google is actually paying attention to this thread and asking the dev team to implement it. As more businesses go over to this for work and people like me don't have a choice, it's going to become more of an issue.

Well, three years on and Google still haven't 'got it', have they?
If I hadn't already got such inertia with my gmail account (replacing my aol one), I'd switch to something else, simply due to the inablity to turn the feature off.
Has Google become too big and lost its agility? Or is it just indifferent?

This will not be a popular response but...

A very many of these negative "conversation\threading" comments are simply from people who have not invested enough time to learn how to use GMail properly. And "enough time" really isn't very long. GMail is very powerful and I, for the most part, LOVE conversation threading - it sure beats having to search around for all the friggin' emails that have anything to do with the one I'm reading!

1. You CAN delete individual emails from a conversation. Learn how!
2. Emails are threaded by SUBJECT as well, not just sender\recipient replies. You can easily reply with a new subject to break the conversation if you like. Learn how!
3. Learn how to use labels and the built in "Search". Very powerful and very fast.

and more... some of the Labs are awesome!

Spend a few minutes to learn the tool your using and you will appreciate it ALOT more.

Still - google should add a non-conversation option for the "corner" cases (PEBCAK and real).

WOW so many people that really do not like the google threading. I thought I was in a significant minority and was living with it, then it annoyed me enough to try to switch to a conventional view and found this.
Clearly unless there is a true marketing reason, google will in time give us what we want (but they do not want too much complexity in their offer - it hits quality - just look at the other extreme M$).
Until then we have to use POP/IMAP on a client machine or POP/IMAP/Forwarding to another mail account - why not Yahoo! - ive not tried it.

+1 on threading hate.

3 years worth of complaints ignored tells me this is probably never going to be changed.

I have been enduring the conversation thing for over 2 years now and I still hate it.

Once i was looking for an important email that I had read earlier that day and had a little banter back and forth with the sender then i had a devil of a time finding that important email message. I searched high and deep and finally found it (the search was NO help) then i navigated away from it for a while then i needed it again and once again and had a devil of a time again -repeat 2 more times whatta pain! (search was NO help yet i was able to find it when i went on a personal search and destroy mission - "clearing my desk of all my other work and concentrating on" finding that email.

A possible workaround...
I've had to do workarounds by adding lables to auto label stuff and starring stuff that i cant affort to lose such that the "filers" on the menu on the left can be of some use.

I've been using Gmail for many years and this conversation feature is just horrible in my opinion. I'm just not getting used to it, no matter how much some people here think I should. It just doesn't work for me. I really like the spam filtering but this conversation filter is forcing me to look for alternatives.

It's really frustrating when I'm sending emails to multiple recipients. It's difficult for me to find the right version of the email that I want to forward to someone else. Or managing BCC recipients becomes almost impossible. This feature has caused me to send emails to people I don't intend.

"A very many of these negative "conversation\threading" comments are simply from people who have not invested enough time to learn how to use GMail properly."

Er... Properly? As decreed by who? I use gmail because of the free IMAP access, so usually manage my emails in Thunderbird on a number of machines. If I wanted to sort them differently (e.g. by sender, subject, etc.) I would, and occasionally do when it suits my needs. However, most of the time I like my messages to be listed in chronological order.

On the occasions when I do use the web-based version I want the same layout as I'm used to in my client program.

I don't buy the argument that threading is the main attraction of gmail. When gmail first came out its primary attraction was the huge amount of storage space, and the extra features, that it offered for free. My main reason for switching to gmail a few years ago was the free pop3 access, which cost extra at Yahoo. Conversation threading is a relatively minor irritation for me, but only because I don't use the web-based version unless I absolutely have to.

This is a shame because google is trying so hard to promote "cloud computing", but this is really the only factor that discourages me from ditching my client program in favour of the web-based interface, now that computers are almost permanently online.

This mail threading feature sucks...navigating through all the muck

People have been complaining about this feature for years on many, many different blogs and discussion boards (over 800 in Google help forums alone). Obviously Google is not going to do anything about it so we have three choices
1. put up with it
2. quit gmail
3. rally together and kick Google's arrogant ass.

I'm all for the 3rd option myself!

I absolutely HATE it HATE it HAAAAAATE it!

I'm ready to kick the arrogant ass, as you say. I can't ever find a previous email, things get lost for days because people just reply to old subject lines - who knows where the thing you're looking for ended up. Wouldn't it have been nice to make this optional so the people who like it can keep it and the people who HATE it can get rid of it. My boss wants to put our whole organization on gmail and I refuse to adapt.

What a pain, to have such a useless and at least in my case non-functioning "feature" without an off switch. Deleting now and moving elsewhere.

Is there a way to deactivate the log in gmail activity??

So Dave's response to a user wanting to switch off an annoying feature is basically "I like the feature, so why don't you?"?

This feature is riddiculously annoying and clunky. I sent out a group email advising my entire contact list of my new google email address. People responded and I responded to their responses. This stupid feature groups not all the conversations in one thread! I could understand threading between two people but I have several names I need to click through in order to read and reply to an individual person!

It's a silly annoying feature. And one that needs an opt out function.

This is very annoyng feature, this should be optional.

Anybody knows, why google doesn't want to change e-mail threading optional?

I can't believe Google still hasn't turned off or made optional this feature (this thread began in 2007!!). Their Gmail interface is better than everyone elses at most things yet this is automated threading is prone to errors and makes the entire Gmail thing unreliable for personal use and downright dangerous for business use.
Is there a petition to make this feature optional? It's not like it would be too difficult

I agree with all above critics of 'tread'. Conversations does not work, or else I have to conclude that friends and collaborators (including myself) are stupid and unable to learn this 'wonderful' feature... There are mistakes made in communications that NEVER happens with other email programs. When there are misunderstandings, it is always with a gmail-contact. Browsing through the list of above messages gives me the feeling that we/I am screaming in empty space. And there is no one out there from google that hear us. Probably Google just 'tread' us as junk mail.

Despise it. Have given it 6 months and still despise it.

Good idea with the petition above. Hope others join.

Perhaps a Facebook group might rally a bit more exposure and support? Anyone?

I despise the conversation threading feature and realize I have to drop gmail. I'm tired of writing people and asking them to resend emails with information I need because I cannot find their originals emails hidden in some converstaion. It's annoying and frustrating.

OK folks, agreed a controversial feature which cannot be disabled is crap. But remember Gmail is free of charge so that the unsatisfied users could go and search for a better world somewhere else !
BTW a problem that (I believe) no one pointed out: threaded conversations ***might*** block POP3 access.I repeatedly experience problems as soon as the thread includes more than say 10 conversation: then my mail client is stuck with the message "getting message list". The workaround is deleting recent messages to trash and incorporate them back **one by one** into the inbox basket until you find the faulty thread !!!

I have a question. Doesn't the threaded conversation feature make labels pointless?

I like to have a folder/lable for each of my friends. When I receive a new e-mail from a friend, I reply, then move his or her e-mail into his or her folder.

With Google, when I have a threaded conversation as follows: Bob, Jill, Steve, Been, Me (23) there seems to be now way to get the e-mails in that threaded conversation into their own folder/label.
I am forced to label the entire threaded conversation when in reality I would like to label Bob's e-mail as Bob, Jills e-mail as Jill, and so on...

Unless I'm just missing something?

UGH, my CSU has switched our entire email system over to an offical Gmail system (with my school's logo on it and everything) and I just loathe it.

I wish all of the potential names I want for an e-mail address weren't already taken on Yahoo; otherwise I'd have swapped out of my AOL account by now! (I know, I'm the last person under 40 to still use AOL - I KNOW!)

I think a Facebook group would be a great stepping stone towards convincing Gmail to make threading optional. I have a personal Gmail account as well, and I love it minus the freaking conversation feature that only serves to annoy me.

Ya, this "feature" would be nice if it was from only one person. But when writing on a blog with several people responding it's hard to search through this a stack of 30 to see which one I didn't respond to. I need to view these on my iphone so I can see each one by itself quickly.

IT sucks. I want it OFF i can't follow responses. Utter trash. I'm furious and may switch back to SBC's horrible spam box.

My employer switched to GMail a few weeks ago and we all hate the conversations feature. Probably useful for a private user, but not for serious corporate use. Too many missed messages, utter confusion.

Astonishing that here we are like THREE YEARS after people started moaning at Google about this and they are still acting like mules on this subject. I am going to have to start calling them Goog$e.

I'm really surprised how many people hate that feature. The conversation feature is the only reason why I used GMail in the first place, I never used a webmail interface before (I hate webmails, and yet I switched to GMail for its webmail!). I use GMail mostly private but I used it for some time for professional issues as well and I never had any problem with it (never missed an email or so: wenn a conversation has several new messages, the unread messages are all opened when you enter the conversation, while the read ones are closed).

The worst that happened: a message sometimes got attached to the wrong conversation, that's a little annoying, but it's very rare.

I hate the conversation threading...they are trying to be too clever by half. I see it all the time in IT, but to see Google stuff up something as simple as email, bloody annoying!!!

I tried using gmail for over 2 years and I hated the threading (conversations) feature. I stopped using gmail for this reason. This is too bad as I loved their contacts and calendar, but I don't want to use gmail for those services and another site for email, so I use Yahoo for everything.

Yahoo isn't nearly as good for contacts and calendars but they have a logical and usable email. If Google should decide to provide a turn off the conversations option I would be back to their service in a heart beat. Apparently, hundreds or thousands of people feel the same way I do from the messages I have read on many discussion groups.

I tried to provide feedback directly to Google but I couldn't find a way to contact them outside of some pre-designed comments that I was allowed to send through gmail. Perhaps they have gotten too big and arrogant now. I remember when the Wordperfect company did the same thing. It is not smart way to do business in the long run.

I think Google was just trying to be better and different with conversations and they either still believe this is better or they are just to arrogant to admit their mistake.

My employer has just switched to Google - I am having such a difficult time adjusting to Google in many aspects after using Outlook for 10 years- however threading is the most difficult. It decreases my productivity and I'm missing things. very confusing to have 13 replies come in on one thread, plus my replies. after 3 weeks, I'm ready to scream out of frustration. I agree that it should be an option and would like be able to turn off threading and end the nightmare.

Personally, I think the conversation threading is a great feature...

for private use.

But, from a corporate side it's horrible. We recently switched to using the corporate gmail product (i.e. gmail product but not gmail address). And as one of the web admins, we've run into a number of issues with this conversation threading. The worst being that almost all auto-generated emails from our website are placed into the same conversation. In order to prevent this we're having to include a timestamp in the subject line, which still doesn't work perfectly. Otherwise we'd have thousands of emails in one conversation with a few dozen to a hundred added daily.

The ability to switch this feature off and view them all separately would be a godsend. Granted, we have our workaround... but that was put in place after the conversion, so all the emails integrated from the old account are stuck as one lump (some 4000+). :/

On the plus side, at least we still use outlook for business/office transactions. I can't imagine how horrible it would become if we had this conversation threading in our general work emails. It's bad enough I can get a few hundred new emails a day, if they were being added to old "conversations" it would be a nightmare. Especially considering it is common practice to reply to an old message with a new subject/issue. >.<

4 Years on and this is still an issue ....

I have no problem with them leaving it as threading by default - but not giving the option to go back to "normal" use (when the code is so trivial) smacks of nannyish "we know better" mentality.

Its a total deal breaker cannot in good conscience recommend this to any customer.

Model T Ford ... Available in any colour you want .... as long as its black :|

Please add me to the 'I Hate Gmail's Conversation Feature' list. It's not a problem for an email with a few replies from the same person, but when others reply or there are many, many replies, it's pure horror. Time for an alternative.

I just switched to gmail and I have to say I really hate this message threading. Messages get lost this way and are hard to view individually. Getting used to it is not an acceptable answer. People like choice, not to be forced to do something. Looks like my search for a suitable e-mail goes on.

for what it's worth, also detest threaded conversations.
i grasp the whole concept (i'm an engineer), but it is frustrating to work with.
sometimes i send a conversation to my work outlook mail, purge, sort and format the 'conversation' then sent back to gmail.
very cumbersome.

i just made a big mistake, and made my boss switch to gmail for his business emails. NOw im having trouble with my orders!!! when ive processed an order, and i get a new one, its mixing them up. HOW DO I KNOW WHICH ONE IS NEW?????????

IF I ARCHIVE IT, IT STILL GROUPS IT!! JUST THE SUBJECT IS THE SAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS. ARGHHHHHHH

When I first started using Gmail, I thought this
feature was great, and to a large degree I still
do, however...

I think that Google should definitely give you
the option to either delete it (judging by most
of these comments) or choose which conversation
threads the messages go to (similar to labels).

The ability to drag and drop, and separate
messages from their conversations would be
excellent. I had this issue this morning from
two different people and somehow ended up in the
same thread.

An alternative for those who like the advantage
of Gmails spam filters, but can't stand the
threading, could be to check your Gmail through
IMAP. Just a thought.

P.S. Remember that services like Gmail are free.
I think too many people expect too much from a
free product.

I work at a university and we recently switched to Gmail. I would say this is the number one complaint about Gmail. Many people HATE the threads!!!! We get asked all the time if there is a way to turn them off. I just found this site trying once again to see if there was something new out there that would enable us to turn threading off, because someone asked us about it again.

Google, get a clue and listen to your users. Just because you love it, doesn't mean it is good for everyone. I personally hate trying to find a small part of some email that is BURIED in a threaded conversation. If I searched in my old email for specific words, I only had to look through maybe a couple short emails to find what I was looking for.

Absolutely hate it....hate it. Behind the scenes it's all the same since you can use use a client (Outlook/Thunderbird or whatever)and get it in the "normal" format then why can't this be a frikkin OPTION.......folks who like it - keep it. Folks who don't - ditch it.

I don't use this word often, but this feature "SUCKS!"

I think I've finally made up my mind to use Yahoo or Ymail from now on.

To summarise the view of the vast majority.. it is dangerous. (People are losing and missing emails, unable to find mails, sending mails inadvertantly to the wrong people). It affects productivity, it is against common sense. People are offended by the lack of a choice, and by the lack of response from Google. Some of the responses from people who happen to be content with the feature (eg the offensive reference to PEBCAK) are not satisfying or persuading anyone.

Threading sucks and Dave is wacked to think it is "so darn useful"... obviously not to everyone and that includes me. If a person likes it cool good for them but for those of who do not we should have the ability to turn it off, what a pain in the ass. Someone is lazy and responds to a message I sent a month ago, rather then enter in my address and now it gets grouped together with a discussion that is no longer taking place sucks ding dong big time.

I love the threading - sort of - the only part I hate about it is the fact that emails with the same subject line get grouped together, no matter who they're from. The conversations - love that. The weird grouping of similar subject lines from different emails sent out - hate.

I find it mind-boggling that Google hasn't yet responded to the near universal detestation for the enforced threading feature in Gmail. It's the only reason that I continue to use Yahoo Mail over Gmail. What's up with this situation?

HI,
I'm not against gmail grouping conversations per se, but how do I prevent gmail from sending out the WHOLE tread when I want to reply to one particular message within the thread?
sangatsu

Huh?

Why would anyone want to "get used" to such a horrible "feature" that doesn't even thread things accurately?!

It is the lack of accuracy and FORCED inaccurate threading that makes this "feature" totally suck.

There is no such thing as "get used" to it.

Threading is fine for organizing a running conversation. But I just sent out an email with the subject line "NDA" to company A, and then it saved it with an old thread from several days ago that also had the subject line "NDA" but was for company B. Does google really think that I will only ever send ONE SINGLE EMAIL EVER with the subject line "NDA"? At least can you give me a way to detach an email from a running thread?

Add my name to the list of people who love Gmail's message threading.

HATE IT! I've been trying to keep an open mind, but after 2 months i'm still missing emails. It's even worse on the BB plug-in. PS: Google is not free, you're reading ads for which they are paid billions of dollars. More gmail subscribers = more eyeballs = more dollars. They should be listening, it's not a charity.

I ACTUALLY HAVE A SOLUTION IF ANYONE WANTS TO GIVE IT A TRY: (Gmail now supports IMAP)

It's not perfect, but better than the stupid threading. I've got no problem with some people finding the threading feature useful. But why not be able to turn it on or off like most e-mail software lets you do? Why not give people the choice? I read somewhere that there's a technical reason for this - something about how Gmail sorts your mail using a search feature rather than a list feature. I only have a vague understanding of what they're talking about, but the take home message was that it's not like Google can just add an option to view without threading. They'd have to make some serious change to the program. Then again, they're freakin' Google, so I'm sure they could figure it out.

Here's what I'm doing - it seems to work so far: You can now access your Gmail via several e-mail applications that use IMAP and POP. I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird which is Mozilla's free e-mail program. Supposedly you can do this using Outlook and a few other programs, but I haven’t tried it. Someone wrote above that the interface with Outlook is kind of hinky and annoying.

Please note - this only resolves Gmail’s annoying issues if you use the same computer(s) to access your email, since you need to have Thunderbird installed on your computer and you have to set it up for your Gmail account.

It's actually pretty easy if you go through the Thunderbird setup wizard. I thought it would be more complicated. I'm already very familiar with Thunderbird (formerly known as the E-mail component of the Mozilla Suite), so that works well for me. One thing to remember is that it’s better (in my opinion) to use the IMAP setting rather than the POP setting. But Gmail's help articles explain all that...

Here’s more info on "other ways to access Gmail":
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12769
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=12806

Info on Gmail with Thunderbird:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78892
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77662

Thunderbird FAQs: http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq

Here’s an article on using Thunderbird for Gmail, and a bit more about setting it up. Please note - keep in mind it’s an older article for an earlier version of Thunderbird so some things may have changed a bit:
http://lifehacker.com/314574/turn-thunderbird-into-the-ultimate-gmail-imap-client

If anyone else is using Thunderbird and/or other e-mail software to access Gmail, what do you think of it? Better yet, maybe a new page on this topic of which e-mail applications are good/bad with the Gmail interface?

ANOTHER NOTE - The only thing that I thought was disaster at first (but I figured out how to fix it) was that when you first install Thunderbird and set it up for your Gmail, the "folders" window is kind of funny. The left-hand side of the reading pane has multiple folders, like you’d expect. But the folder that appears at the top, called "Inbox", has two copies of every message! I found more information on this and how to fix it, sort of. (I think the info was on Google’s help pages, but I can't find the link right now, but will update if I find it again):

It turns out that you will see this problem when you’re in the "Smart Folders" view (see details below). With the Smart Folders view, if you have more than one e-mail address set up within Thunderbird, you can see a compilation of all the messages in all your inboxes, all inside a main “Inbox” Smart Folder. But when you use an IMAP interface between your e-mail program and Gmail, something happens that that tags each message once for your Gmail folder and once for your main "Inbox", or something like that. So when you click on your main Inbox in the "Smart Folders" view, you'll see multiple copies of each message from your Gmail account. You can’t really fix this, but you can “hide” it. I might have gotten some of that technical , and don’t see the logic of this double-tagging function. But here's a solution that worked for me:

After you install and set up Thunderbird for your e-mail, you’ll see the left side of the reading pane with your list of folders. The default setting is for the "Smart Folders" view (which I call the Stupid Folders view). To confirm this, at the top of that left-hand reading pane, if it says Smart Folders then your in the Stupid Folders view :). Next to that you'll see a pair of left/right arrow toggle buttons. Toggle one click to the right, to the "All Folders" setting, and you'll see the folders appearing the way you would normally expect in Thunderbird (or Outlook, etc.). The main “Inbox” Smart Folder that had multiple copies of everything is no longer visible in the All Folders view. Instead, you see an Inbox listed under your Gmail account name. So far it’s work okay for me in the All Folders view.

You might have to tweak things a bit more to suit your purposes. For example I like to be able to see the column for File Size (refer to Thunderbird’s help section), but I could never figure out if/how this could be done in Gmail itself. You can hide certain columns you don’t care about, and you can re-size the column widths, which Gmail itself can’t do. And you can drag and drop on the name of each column heading to change the order of the column fields. A lot of this stuff can be found in Thunderbird’s help sections.

Incidentally, someone said they found a Google suggestion page:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/
But when I clicked on the all I get is the mail Google page (I even Googled for the link, and found it, and clicked on it from the Google search results, and the same thing happened.

Do you think Google doesn’t want our suggestions anymore? :(
(or maybe the link is just temporarily broken)

i HATE the threading. its making me want to go back to hotmail.

Threading might be useful,if it CORRECTLY identified related conversations, but it does not. Mail from different people about different topics get grouped together inappropriately. Mails get lost. Deadlines misse. There is no notification of a new incoming mail, if it google incorrectly thinks it belongs in an already existing thread.
No, give us the option to turn conversations off. It sucks.

UGH. Add me to the list of HATE it. Just signed up for gmail today and was so looking forward to it.

I sent one test email to two friends (we talk back and forth in email all day) and 15 minutes later I was completely lost in the thread (why on earth do I want to see what I sent them?) and accidentally deleted everything because I just wanted to delete a single email. (yes I figured out how to recover it)

This is a FEATURE? I don't think so. Back to Outlook for me.

80/20 rule. 80% of the time it's great. The other 20% of the time it sucks.

Yes, this feature is nice for ordinary conversations, but it's a nightmare for tracking system status messages. I can't tell from looking at the index whether a 'PROBLEM' has been resolved, because the corresponding 'OK' message is lumped in a separate thread ('conversation' in Googlespeak) with all the other problems. This just won't do, so I'm switching back to a real mail client until Google adds the ability to turn this 'feature' off.

I agree, there should be an option to turn it off.

For now I'm just going to IMAP it via Outlook when I need to track e-mail message by date. A shame Google doesn't listen to users more. Turning into Microsoft.

These conversations are the reason |I am looking to move away from gmail. on a one-reply conversation they are tolerable, but any more than that and the situation is totally unbearable! Have a look at gmx - that seems a good alternative (but I don't think it's as fast - try it and see what you think)

I have appreciated the idea of conversations being grouped together. However, until recently, I needed to sort my email chronologically and view what mail i got and when. Cuz of threads/conversations feature, if the first mail of the conversation was sent on day 1, the the latest mail on the same conversation was sent on day 10, the sort feature showed me that mail at DAY 10 rather than day 1. that is problematic. PLEASE RESOLVE this issue.

Now that we have moved our company email to Gmail I am constantly bombarded with requests to fix/ turn off this feature. It is absolutely useless in our organization and works against us. We have informed our CIO that the fix is to go back to Exchange until this horrible "feature" can be turned off.

there used to be the option of switching it off, now google have withdrawn it.

all we would like it the CHOICE to do so.

still, on balance gmail rocks.

When Microsoft stopped listening to customers, they started producing operating systems like ME and Vista and products like the Zune. Remember the "Mojave experiment" adds from Microsoft? That was a "you'll learn to like it mentality." Look what happened to Vista. Recently, Google jumped on the bad product bandwagon with the Wave. Add gmail 'conversations' to this list.

For business users who send different categories of emails to many of the same small groups, this feature is insane. Maybe if I was a 20-something with nothing to do except text and play online games, it would be fine. But for productive people, this 'feature' hurts the brain.

Gmail has screwed up Reply to All emails (which can be dangerous) for me in the past, but this is the last straw. Like another person said, why not make it something that can disabled? And what about sorting? Give users features - don't force them to think like Google does. A

If Google wanted to help, they would understand that the number of emails is rising and the use of attachments is increasing. That should be a clue to someone about how to more forward (and not with the Wave). Attachments were a bit of an add-on to standard email in the beginning, but now they are the primary purpose for many emails. And you can't handle a large number of incoming emails by limiting the number that can be displayed on a single page and forcing uses to go through multiple pages. I don't want to have to search my emails or set filters every single time I open my account. I need to see my unread emails and deal with the highest priority items first.

Google - don't go the way of Microsoft and pigheadedly start making bad products. Listen to your users.

This (so called) conversation grouping is the worst feature I've seen since Vista's Windows Explorer.
Probably the same guys from Vista Team added this to Gmail.

conversation threading ,, so thats what the dam thing is called ,, hate it too ,, someone should code up a gadget or plugin or something to get rid of it ,, drives me nuts lol

Very disappointed to learn you can't turn it off. My ISP has recently moved to google for mail so the webmail client has changed for the simple and clean interface they used before to the mess that is gmail. Ugh!

I'm a software developer and using Gmail for more than two years.

This email threading "feature" absolutely sucks. I constantly miss emails because the "feature" makes it hard to keep track of new emails.

In a corporate environment an email message equals an task. Unread emails represent "to do". If I can't mark mails individualy as read/unread (or archive them individually) inside a conversation, I can't keep track of which emails I handled, and which emails still need to be answered/handled.

Now what happens, I have a thread with 10 old emails and 5 new emails. If I enter the thread, the new mails are expanded. If I don't have time to read all the 5 new emails, and I click on inbox to see another email, gmail marks the entire thread as read, and if I enter the thread again later, all the mails are collapsed, and I have no way to know what mails I read and what mails I didn't read last time I entered the thread. THAT IS "TEH SUCK" (tm).

Also, if I want to count how many individual mails about some subject I received in one week, I can't, because they are grouped with emails from other weeks.

This makes it very easy to miss an important task. The only workaround for this ugly shit is to use IMAP and a different client.

This is a bug, not a feature, and needs to be made optional.

Google are starting to behave the same as Apple: we know what's good for you, even if you don't like it.

They need to understand that many of their users are not children, and can decide for themselfs what is good for them.

And finally, I HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT :)

this conversation/threads crap is so damn annoying.

i wish i could disable it

this conversation/threads crap is so damn annoying.

i wish i could disable it

this conversation/threads crap is so damn annoying.

i wish i could disable it

this conversation/threads crap is so damn annoying.

i wish i could disable it

this conversation/threads crap is so damn annoying.

i wish i could disable it

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

it drive me crazy!!!!!!!!!

It's not so easy to "turn off" because google didn't respect the known, familiar, traditional (20+ years) way of doing things to begin with, which is arrogant. If software companies WEREN'T arrogant, they would implement (keep) the known, established way of doing things, then invent their "new" way, then code a way to turn it off. Problem solved. Easy. No-one's offended. Somebody explain why google, micro$oft, yahoo et. al. can't do that.

Gmail is evil.
GMAIL IS EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I HATE THREADS!!!!!!!
It makes it impossible to see any new emails.

agree. very irritating and has caused me to miss new emails etc, the consequences of which could be disastrous. it's a shame because i otherwise love google, but i have to opt for windows live instead.

Please vote for the idea of disabling this feature on Google ideas for Buzz.
http://productideas.appspot.com/#16/e=4a51a
and
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestions.cs

Just imagine if real mail worked like conversation view. Who needs real mail coming in chronologically each day in a mailbox. I mean, if your mom sends you a physical piece of mail, it should just appear immediately next to any other letters your mom sent you over the years in some filing cabinet. Instead of checking your mailbox to see if she sent you something recently, you should be going through every file in your filing cabinet to see which people actually sent you something that day. Yeah, Google, you've really got this one figured out.

Isn't it nice to get mail chronologically? Like a breath of fresh air really.

Mr. Big Boss Man arrives at the office. He's quite meticulous and always likes to examine the mail the post man delivers each day.

Mr. Boss Man
(to his secretary)
Where is my mail? You usually place the new mail on my desk in the morning!

Secretary Gaggle
I've thought of a better way Mr. Boss Man.
I filed all of it away in our file cabinets.

Mr. Boss Man
What? Was there nothing important in it?

Secretary Gaggle
No, there seemed to be a lot of important stuff. But I thought I’d just file it away to save time later on.

Mr. Boss Man
Our filing cabinets are filled with year’s worth of archives. How am I supposed to find the stuff that just came in?

Secretary Gaggle
Oh, I put a little mark on every piece of mail. Just pull out all the folders and look for the bold mark. I’m sure you find most of it. The good news is that it’s already been filed so now you don’t even have to see it!! Look how clean your desk is!!!

Mr. Boss man gets up and opens a filing cabinet. He flips through some folders trying to find some of the recent mail.

Mr. Boss Man
How am I supposed to find any of my mail. Do you remember any of it?

Secretary Gaggle
Well, just ask me... I can help you search.

Mr. Boss Man
Ok. Did that customer Ms. Henkin send any mail? I was expecting something from her.

Secretary Gaggle
Oh, yeah. I think she did. But I didn’t put it under her file name because she was asking about our new product. So I filed it under the “new product” folder.

Mr. Boss Man
This is ridiculous!!! How am I supposed to find ANYTHING!

Secretary Gaggle
No really, my new system is much better...

Mr. Boss Man
What about Mr. Mucker? You know he’s sending an important business letter.

Secretary Gaggle
I don’t think he sent anything. Let me check his file. (She finds an envelope) Oh. Yeah, I guess he did. Here’s the whole file on him - I’m absolutely sure you’ll probably need to see everything he’s ever written to you... There... See? I can help you search for anything you ask me about. Sometimes I amaze myself how totally efficient I am. I’m so quick I filed all the mail before anyone even had to bother reading it!! Everything is great!!

Mr. Boss Man
Can you please just find everything that came in the mail today and give it to me? I ONLY WANT THE STUFF FROM TODAY!!!!

Secretary Gaggle
No! My mind doesn’t work like that. You need to jog my memory with keywords or something. Then maybe I can try to pull the related files. I hope I sorted it all correctly – I’m sure I did. Anyways, if we miss a few letters, I’m sure it’ll be alright.

Mr. Boss Man
You’re FIRED!

Mr. Boss Man was unable to find a couple very important letters which happened to come in the mail that day. One very timely letter sat in the filing cabinet until well after the court proceedings. Luckily, Mr. Boss Man only lost his business and his home. It’s too bad Secretary Gaggle was so incompetent but Mr. Boss Man will just have to deal with it. That’s life.

-------

The craziest part is that this is basically a true story – FOR EVERYONE WHO USES G-MAIL!!!

I still simply do not comprehend HOW Google can not see how OBVIOUS this problem really is. I mean this is a major issue that anyone from any perspective can easily see that GOOGLE IS IN THE WRONG HERE. Sorting mail by date is an ESSENTIAL FEATURE of a MAIL PROGRAM. I really don’t understand how anyone can even bother defending Google in this... I mean – yeah, they have “Search” – but so what?? Search is not SORT as the above dialogue expresses. Threaded conversations is a nice feature – for a very specific function only. IT SHOULD BE OPTIONAL!

I guess the really upsetting part is not so much that Google is clearly incompetent. Everyone make mistakes. It’s that when I search online about this topic, I find plenty of threads with LOTS of people all bitterly complaining that this is a problem. So Google KNOWS this is a major problem and refuses to fix it. The question is why? Why be EVIL? Power trip? They honestly think they are correct and only allowing threaded conversations will teach us all the errors of our ways? What’s the deal? It’s been years and this hasn’t been fixed... Why?

I never understood why people do evil things. The one satisfying bit to all of this is that eventually – at some point in the future, UNTHREADED SORT BY DATE will – I repeat – WILL be added into G-mail. Why do I say this? Because it is OBVIOUS. Anyone with half a brain can see that humans communicate FIRST in TIME and only then by SUBJECT. Think about that. It’s a fundamental aspect of the laws of physics of the universe. And Google is perverting those laws and trying to bend them to their will. But it can’t last forever and therefore I can safely predict this will change to reflect the way nature fundamentally works.

I can only hope someone at Google can read this and the feature will be added sooner than later. The longer they refuse to address such a fundamental flaw just shows how stubborn and arrogant they really are. And once this problem is finally fixed, the world will be ever so slightly better for a few hundred million people.

I too find Google Mail (GM) unusable because of the way it organizes messages into threads. As a result I use GM only as a "junk" e-mail address for BBS postings, online purchases, or other online activities that are likely to precipitate "junk" e-mail. If/when Google makes it possible for the user (a.k.a. customer) to disable the message thread presentation format, I may reconsider using GM as an everyday e-mail client.

Add me to the list of haters. I hate it when companies 'solve' problems that never really existed. I also hate it when email is sent to 'Me'. I hate it when software thinks it is cleverer than the person using it!

The arrogance of Google. If I had a choice I would switch to something else ...

I cannot believe that this post will have it's 4th birthday in August of this year. You would think that Google would've at least recognized this as an end user need/want and jump on it, or at least put it in their "Labs" section.

I was happy to discover that I can place my signature at the top of a reply by selecting an option within Google "Labs", but discouraged when I found that there was STILL no solution to this glaring problem other than the obvious: stop using Gmail as your primary email account.

I will say this; I have an iPhone that is linked to my Gmail account and as the mail flows in it is displayed chronologically. I love that aspect of my iPhone and generally work solely from my iPhone, but it's incredibly confusing when I get back in front of my computer and have to glance at my iPhone to determine the subject of the message so that I can find it within Gmail... GRRR! I just want to see today's mail, damn-it!

To sum up:

Dear Google, if want to have a 'conversation' with someone (or a group of people), i will use GTalk or Chat (or even call them...who does that anymore?). But please, don't subject my inbox to a life of complicated organization by not allowing me to control the way I want to view it.

Thanks!

I've had enough of this bunk conversation "feature." F you very much Google. Yahoo mail I'm coming back. Bing, oh Bing come here please. I need a new search engine.

OMG, this issue still persists!
I was using gmail for some time, but never seriously.
Only recently when I want to use gmail as my main email address, the problems come... and so many unwanted features!
Why can't people in Gmail do something in the last several years?
Luckily I still have my old nice yahoo/msn account

Its a silly feature and recommending people to "get used to it" fails to take into account that it uses up a hell of a lot of bandwidth on mobile devices and imap clients. I use gnus and HATE seeing my "sent" mails in my INBOX as new INBOX messages. It's lame and there ought to be a way to disable it. I'm thinking of dumping gmail as a result - were it not for its tight integration into Android I would.

Hmm. Damn. I came here while looking for a way to turn this threading feature off. Sigh...

Will now go to http://productideas.appspot.com/#16/e=4a51a and suggest it the Google. See if it helps..

The subject grouping may be the greatest thing in the world, but good software would allow you to turn this off.
Nice to see that even Google fails sometimes.

The biggest problem I have is when there are several people in on a conversation in the same thread... if I open one, it shows I've read them all when I havent... Or if a person responds twice before I reply, I may only see one... I miss emails as a result all the time... so i cant switch over all my contacts... which bites becasue its the only email that works properly with the Droid.

Oh dear, I was hoping for a way to un-thread my mails. I help to run a small charity and we often miss replies because of the threading. Another quite serious issue is accidentally forwarding a thread instead of a single message, which could cause privacy issues.
Lots of people seem to think it's a great feature and it can be for some uses, but it would be better if it was optional. The search facility is excellent so threads aren't needed really.

Being primarily a yahoo mail user I set up a gmail account to see how it works. I find the mandatory threading maddeningly frustrating too. I DO NOT HAVE TIME OR DESIRE TO SPEND A "FEW WEEKS" LEARNING SOMETHING THAT ~I~ DON'T NEED JUST BECAUSE ~YOU~ THINK IT"S A GREAT IDEA! (forgive the caps - sometimes it is appropriate). It should be an optional feature, and the duration of this thread proves that Google is unfortunately developing a "big brother" attitude that, sadly, will be their downfall. On a related vein, I switched my home page to Bing after the recent Google pacman fiasco. Google - I loved your original concept. Sorry to see you go down this path.

Anyone remember "AOL". If I had time I'd start a thread for the creative associations that acronym came to engender ;-/

Have just come to gmail and I'm staggered to find that there isn't an option to turn off conversation view. That way everyone would be happy! There are so many settings options for things which are far less important: threading is 'in your face' everytime you open gmail. Developers obviously consider it wonderful and appreciated by all: they should read this comment thread!

I think it just goes to show that a 4 year old post that is still alive proves that Google should be considering this at least as a labs feature.

Pleeeaase make threading optional. It is such an irritating "feature".

I came is search of an answer but instead found a load of others with the same infuriation. Come on Google, allow me to de-thread my messages or else I'll have to continue to use an IMAP client and miss out on all that additional superfluous content you're trying to force feed me through the "sponsored links" in the web client.

Google messaging threading is nasty.

I will stop the feature "Forwarding"

If selected, Google will forward the first one, but if another e-mail merges in a conversation with it, this second one (and the subsequent ones) will remain there forever and will never be forwarded.

So what's the point of the Forward option if "Conversation" kills it?

Any suggestion?

I hate it too! I wish you could customize it to act like outlook, where you can CHOOSE how to sort it instead of only having the convo-sort option. Sometimes I forward things and then I can't tell if the forward went to the person or not! REALLY CONFUSING. The only good thing about gmail is their spam filtering. The view sucks!

I HATE the feature very very very much! How can I diaable it??????????

I hate it to. I prefer no conversations.

The threaded mail is quite a cool feature - but I don't understand Googles reason for not allowing it to be turned off.

I'm finding that sometimes the newest message is not at the bottom - but second or third from. I presume it's something to do with time/date settings on different senders PC's? This makes some threads difficult to follow as the order gets messed up.

Also (or alternatively) how about putting new messages at the top? I have one conversation with over 500 messages. It takes a while to scroll through even the collapsed messages then hunt for the new one.

Yes this quirk gets really annoying when you are waiting for an email reply and discover it's been sent to yr mail weeks ago... or probably you'll never know if you didn't happen to search your old threads.

I'm now forwarding some of my mails to my other account but surely there's a better solution out there??

GOOGLE - Are you listening?!?!?! The people have spoken. Give us an option to turn this OFF!

I have tried "getting used to" this feature - I cannot tell you the number of messages that I have missed because of this "most desired feature".

I'm sure there are people out there who love this feature, but a LOT of us HATE it. Why NOT make an option to turn it off?

The most annoying part of Gmail!!! Why don't we have the option to turn it off?!!
It is so easy to lose emails and get confused with these 'conversations' that I'm just about to delete the whole account and go back to hotmail. ANNOYING!!!

G-mail "threading" is one of the worst stupid features of all time.

Add my vote for an option to turn it off!

I would completely forego the webmail interface and use only Thunderbird, except that at work I can't send email via TBird (blocked ports).

Funny, I like almost everything Google does, but this one completely blows. I've been using it for a few years now and I still hate it.

The other problem, if you use multiple mail clients: if you have a conversation archived with a label, and you get a new email in that conversation, it (the whole conversation) shows Inbox and MyLabel as its two labels, but this is misleading. For if you then delete the Inbox label and expect your new message to go into the MyLabel label (as is indicated right on the conversation), you will be sorely mistaken. Your message will be gone, only to be found in the All Messages label along with a trillion other old ones. Google claims this is not a bug....

I despise the threading option in Gmail. I use it because my other email client was blocked at work. But as a writer, I've got several different brainstorming emails going on at once and before i've finished typing two more brainstorming issues come in.

I also detest the way that it downloads MY answers into my Outlook client where I store emails for offline access and backup.

I'm thinking of going back to Yahoo just because of the threading issue. I'm surprised it's not a choice.

If you are using POP3 or SMTP with gmail, but ocasionally have to get online to check your email, it's almost impossible to find which part of the message is NEW because Google online assumes you haven't read any of it!

If this worked perfectly, it would still suck. But since it groups things inappropriately, it is especially bad. I had two responses to a craigslist post get threaded even though they were from seperate people, and missed a sale because of it. In another case, I was trying to read something safe and appropriate at work, and another (inappropriate) e-mail was threaded into it and it came up visible on the screen.

Now I can't even delete the inappropriate one without deleting the good one too? WTF?

I hate this part of gmail. I still maintain a yahoo mail account (12 years!) just because of this.

My positive feelings of Google have taken a bit of a knock from reading this. I find it amazing that the issue has still not been resoved about 3 years after the start of this thread.

I'm just trialling GMail with Google Apps as a possibility of replacing my current email provider. Pros are the resources and (I presume) reliability of Google. Less danger of being unable to access email when a server goes down.

But there seem to be a few "features" that I'm struggling to get used to and this auto threading aka "conversations" feature is one of them.

I was just testing a newsletter email using my GMail account. I sent three versions of the newsletter to my GMail account, each with minor differences to the appearance.

When I go to GMail all three versions are grouped into a "thread". But they are not a thread - this is not a conversation, it's just 3 emails with the same subject and very similar content. So the threading is just incorrect, for a start.

Secondly, GMail has decided that the later 2 versions of the email are quotations of the first email. They're not, again - they just contain some of the same content.

Specifically regarding the way in which GMail automatically marks text as quotation, just because it is also in the first email, seems to me ridiculous. There exists a perfectly good way of dealing with quotations already: 90% of email clients, if you reply, will automatically include the body of the previous email as a citation for you.

GMails auto quotation is a) inaccurate, and b) unecessary. Same thing goes for the threading.

I do actually use threading a lot with my usual email client, Thunderbird, where it is really useful in certain circumstances. But it is implemented far better there. It works; it can be switched off;...

Poor stuff from Google on this one!

This feature is supposedly coming soon check out this article:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-gmail-change-2010-6

Sorry guys but I've been trying to "get used to it" for two years. Threading/conversations might be a useful feature if it worked correctly. However, when it ties totally unrelated e-mails together and important e-mails get lost seems to me threading is quite worthless. So I obtained the pop settings for gmail and tried that. Guess what? Still worthless. E-mails lost, duplicate e-mails downloaded from the server, just garbage. The only thing I kinda like about gmail is the ability to search e-mails for a particular word, but sometimes...even that doesn't work correctly.
Now that we learn that google streetview also collected information from neighborhood wifis, can we trust google with our data anyway?

I too find threading frustrating and often miss emails because they are buried in lenghty conversaitons/threads. I forward my mail to good old trusty hotmail ... until they can give me the option of switching it off.

Couldnt agree more on all the comments on threading emails. I hate it. I lose emails, looked effortless for specific ones in threads that contained loads of messages from one particular person, and another important option; I can't delete any individual messages (for instance with attachments or just to keep the ones that are important). Google is losing clients for sure...

I gave up trying to understand these "conversations" or "threads." When I pull these things up they are so confusing. I can't tell what is the most recent message and what is the old one. I also keep missing e-mails. I don't like the idea of having to scroll through 1,500 e-mails every day to see if somebody might have responded to some older e-mail. I kind of solved it by changing to a different free e-mail provider. I'd love it if they gave me an option to use the traditional method.

it's another "great" invention from Google, like the google page fade in. I absolutely hate it.

I hate the threading too, I can see two reasons why they have not changed.

1. Google support etc have to use gmail, and therefore all of our emails have lot of similar subjects and therefore the 1000's and 1000's emails are threaded and a load of them are associated with emails filed away years ago, the net result Google are only "seeing" a VERY much smaller number of complaints!!!!.

2. Arrogance maybe?

Options
we need to send emails with unique subject lines. or stop using them, neither very likely, hence why no response to customer requests. and remember so many of the users are blissfully unaware of the issue.

Still hoping!!

When will google learn that none of us like threading? I work in software and have grown up with the internet and email. Google email still confuses me and is frustrating. I prefer outlooks format, but I don't want to forward my personal emails to my work email. What should we do? Take a survey google!

I figured since most positive responses are missing because this seems to be a bottomless pit of people who have issues with it, that I would add a positive note.

I've used email almost since the inception of email and threading is the greatest thing I have ever run into when it comes to sorting.
I can understand people being in the odd situation of needing the same subject line for every email that comes to them (automated scripted emails, etc), however believing that you are in the majority just because you are doing it is irrational.

Understand that emails for most people are not like that, and when the same subject line is used for every email it's not a good thing. If a system is going to be used that has threading (like Gmail), and you are basing your company/secretarial system/etc on it, a great idea is to add some form of unique identifier for each message coming through. This is something that I have done for what seems like countless years, and I'm astonished it's not common practice by most people.. well.. most people here that is.

The world does not bend to you, you bend to the world in most cases. This goes for MS Exchange/Lotus Notes/etc. Having the option to use IMAP or POP3 adds the capability to mold it to your use. Take that opportunity by the horns, and make it yours!

Maybe Google should take notes from Microsoft who recently implemented the conversation view. Unlike Gmail, in Hotmail you can choose to turn off the conversation view, as I have done. I tried it and didn't like it. It's all about choice but I guess Google is slowly turning into Apple in that department.

It just doesn't work and it makes inbox-view worthless. You have to search for everything.

Problems:

1) It is good etiquette to make your email subjects informative. By doing so, you make the conversation-threading even more of a jumbled mess.

2) It commonly lumps emails of DIFFERENT conversations into one line item. Say, I send different emails to 3 friends, using the subject line. Gmail congeals them all into a single useless lump.

4) Since new emails do not show up as a line item, it is easy to miss them. I am forced to use Gmail for work, and I have missed several important emails because Gmail does not (like Yahoo or even Hotmail) put each new email on a separate line.

--------------------

The Gmail "conversation threading" feature is a classic example of a company wanting to force bad decisions on people. It is similar to the situation of the first iMac in which you paid extra to not have printer ports or removable storage (someone at Apple deemed these features to be immoral or something).

conversation threading is innovation from the people of hell

Six months ago I had to set up an e-mail account for a voluntary organisation I represent. Blissfully unaware of the ghastly "conversations" feature I opted for Googlemail but now I regret the decision bitterly. A computer user for 32 years, I still fail to understand the logic behind the counter-intuitive "sorting" which wastes valuable time and has caused me to miss important replies.

I am pleased to see from Mr Taylor's web site that there is actually a way to close my Google account. Despite the disruption this will cause, it will be worth it to be rid of this dreadful affliction.

I love the threading system between me and others or small groups of people. However, our business forced us to switch to gmail as an educational application and the threading aspect of conversations does not work when you send out mass emails to 50-60 clients. This is where the threading part becomes a headache. I am sure google will make it an option, but it really should be a no brainer...let the user decide if they want to use threading or not.

I have read more than 80% of the comments on this page, and here is my penny's worth.

About this Gmail threading, I would NOT say it is good or bad. To some who do not mind threading is good, to those others to whom threading is getting in their way of working it is bad.

I belong to those who do not like threading. Why?

Here is why. I have been using gmail since 2005 and now I have 6868 threads. Many of the threads have several dozens of emails grouped together. The problem is, when I speak with my business partners, they will refer to an email they sent let's say 6 months ago, but on my conversations list, the conversation date is only 1 month ago because the last email's date to have been grouped in that particular thread was from 1 month ago. This can be troublesome because I cannot tell that person to wait indefinitely until I can locate that very particular email.

Moreover, when I do expand the thread, it is not a big issue if the thread contains only a few short emails. However, if the thread is several dozens of emails long where each has a few to dozens of mechanical drawings, photos, and other attachments, it is not easy to get to the email you are looking for.

If I had an option to unthread, then it would be a matter of asking the date and time the email was sent by my correspondent, and voila.

I also wish to say to those who commented to "get used to it" or to "use pop clients" or to "switch to yahoo" or anything similar to these that I expect the gmail service to provide what I want instead of I having to get used to it, especially when I am a paying user of Gmail.

Having said all the above, my conclusion is that I really would appreciate if Google listened to the complaints from the users and provide a solution (which I do not believe should be really complicated because if Google can group, then Google should be able to ungroup since I am sure that on the server emails are not physically grouped). In this way, Gmail should truly become THE email service for everyone.

For the love of god make this optional!

Dave Taylor hasn't answered the question about disabling conversations in Gmail, but he sure has answered the following question for himself:

How to make money:

1. set up a blog like web site with ads (for ex: Google ads) and allowing (semi-)anonymous posting

2. find an issue that is annoying a lot of people, has not been discussed a lot yet, has no current solution, and is unlikely to get one anytime soon (for ex: Google service feature limitations. Good alternatives are Apple product and service issues. Both companies are extremely stubborn - and, mostly, successful - in having a pure top-bottom way of designing things and totally ignoring user feedback)

3. post a page pretending to answer the issue, at least in the title of the post. Actual content may be "get used to it cause it is better this way" (Google or Apple), "use M$hit if you don't like it" (Apple only I guess).

4. since the issue is little discussed, your page will eventually show up in search engines (for ex: Google) with "adequate" ranking

5. since you allowed for easy commenting, it will easily serve as a repository for (mostly legitimate) rants

6. virtuous circle: more rants better ranking more traffic more ad money

7. PROFIT!

I especially love how Google plays a part in basically everything here (issue, search engine, ads).

Well done Dave.

When are we going to get a fix to this problem? Does someone at google even hear us?
I get hundreds of emails a day working back and forth with china on tons of products. It is annoying to not be able to just find the last email received. Emails hide in a thread. I just need the option to use it or not use it. Google, you were on the right track with technology, why allow microsoft outlook to fix your issues for you?

@Rachel at September 13, 2010 11:05 PM
Exactly, this mandatory 'feature' is pointless. I receive a lot of mail too and I have missed very important e-mails. I flag important mail threads but that is not enough.

I don't understand why software developers keep on discarding classic functionality completely with no way to revert or disable new functionality. You see this everywhere. For years you're doing thing one way, it doesn't even bother you, you are used to things. Then all the sudden you're forced to do things differently. For no other reason than 'your convenience'.

Software developers, changing or discarding basic classic functionality is *not* convenient. It's never convenient. It's bugging.

It reminds me on how Google decided that near matches instead of exact matches is 'convenient' while I picked Google as my primary search engine years ago just because of the exact matches. I hated the stupid near matches other search engines produced. Useless. But what should I be thinking now, Google? "Wow, you have found me 200,000,000 hits instead of 100 and now you show me your suggestions first, just like all the other search engines, thank you!" ? I don't think so.

What happened to giving the end user a choice? This is poor design.

As of yesterday, google is beginning to allow you disable threading!!! Woohoo!!! They call it "conversation view" and it will soon be in your settings as an on/off option (if it isn't there already!).

Darn. I stumbled here doing a search on how to disable this dumb threaded conversation feature in Gmail.

It's HORRIBLE!

How depressing... I just read through this whole post to see if I could find a solution to turning off the 'conversation' threading.

Different people like to organize things in different ways.

I personally cannot stand the forced grouping - I don't even like how newer versions of windows automatically group the windows within the task bar, so - I TURN THE FEATURE OFF and problem solved.

Why can google not give users the option to turn this feature off???!!!

I have not gone into gmail q&a etc to look further into this yet, but if I cannot find a solution I think that I will be closing up my account and sadly moving on.

I say sadly because I like having a gmail account, the potential for it to be a great provider is there, they just need to give users the freedom to choose how they want to organize.

Well, after I posted my message I saw the new post from Carlos G. Great news!! I checked my inbox setting and it does not seem to be there yet but I will be keeping a close watch, perfect timing! Thanks for the wonderful update Carlos!!

I read Carlos G comments and checked the Settings and it's there! I turned it off!!!

Wooooo Hoooooo!!!

Carlos is right! You can indeed turn off message threading / conversation view in Google Mail, after years of complaints! I've also written up a tutorial to ensure you know how to change it too:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/disable_turn_off_message_threading_conversation_view_google_gmail.html

Thanks again, Carlos, for keeping us up-to-date!

Excellent news, many thanks to Carlos and Dave. I've made the change and it seems to work. I deal with many e-mails about one subject, so now I can choose which to keep and which to delete much more easily and shouldn't need to worry about wording subject lines deliberately to defeat the Conversations feature.

I am still struggling in the fact I like to "move" a sent message into a folder to help keep things organized. You can't... sent mail can be "labeled" but not moved (unless you want it in the inbox.) So, it's better - but not equivalent to other web based mail like Yahoo or Outlook. If I am wrong and you can, please let me know...

Let me put my 2p in and say I hate it too and feel rather annoyed at 'Dave's' lame comment. As with others, I came here looking for a fix to a problem not a sales speech to convert me because I'm an influencable, mindless drone. Is he getting kick backs from Google?

No kickbacks, just a difference in opinion...

To Google -- Thank you, thank you, thank you for the ability to turn off Conversation View through Settings. Now I can reply while attaching only a subset of a thread, and I can send someone a thread without adding them to the original copy. Dave, I am dousing my torch and putting away my pitchfork (until next time). Kudos to all the spirited opponents of involuntary threading who spoke up over a three-year period.

To Google and Author:

If I wanted a "newsthread" mailing system then why doesn't everyone just get a cheap newsfeed accounts, and that way all their emails will be scrunched into one gigantic THREAD !?
In other words, this method is primarily used by "Newsreader" software. Hence,....

This is condescending on Google's part to "force" anyone into a mailing style that Google thinks is the best.

And the fact that Google DOESN"T allow anyone to change their mail settings to "non-threaded" is simply wrong.
Be different Google, but don't force your methods on all others.

It is OBVIOUSLY not the best for all people, ie. businesss, .....
Is there no way we can simply change this to "non-threaded" ???

In the meantime, it'll be back to "live.ca" or "hotmail.ca" for this one.
Atleast those "Inbox's" work, like a mail Inbox should
:)

Rick, check it out: you can turn off conversation threading in Gmail now, if you really want to:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/disable_turn_off_message_threading_conversation_view_google_gmail.html

:-)

@Richard Allen at October 9, 2010 5:51 AM

Thx ! for the tip:

"...Thank you, thank you, thank you for the ability to turn off Conversation View through Settings..."

mmm, this does look promising.

@Dave Taylor
re: Inbox: non-threaded conversation mail
"... check it out: you can turn off conversation threading in Gmail now, if you really want to:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/disable_turn_off_message_threading_conversation_view_google_gmail.html ..."

Thanks Dave, for the above link, and others here, and ya, this is lookin better already in gmail.
:)

And thx again Dave for the quick response here, wow,
I could only wish our "ISP"'s were that fast with their "paid-for" support,
;)

YEEAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! (Turned it off).

Hello All,

I finally get rid of this Madness... Yahoooooooooo... follow the following steps to stop threading.

1. Go to Setting.
2. Click on Conversation view off option.
3. Save setting..

Enjoy
The old Gmail Enviroment.....

also very much dislike the "conversations" feature. It feels sloppy and is confusing.

Thank you! I was reading all these posts and was so disillusioned that I would be unable to turn off the threads. Until I scrolled down to the post from Aftab Ahmed khan. Thank you to whoever figured it out, it is now so much easier!

OMG, it's over!

I tried. I really tried. Now that this "feature" is finally an OPTION I can move to Gmail from Hotmail.

I came to this page with knowledge of the change but was still comforted by all the shared pain here (LOL) that I never knew existed.

I am still reasonably BEWILDERED that the 'conversation view' adherents apparently never encounter what the rest of us see as critical failures.

But reading this today gave me closure.

Thanks to Dave Taylor. Your opening comments were annoying but you seem like a reasonable dude when all is said and done :)

Glory Glory Hallelujah

If you want to remove the damn ads, try this google chrome extension, its called "better gmail", u can down load from here:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mgdnblnolcinnndenjnollpiplgkbjcn?hl=en

"Conversations" is some nerd's brilliant logic as to how all us peasants should work.

*NERD FAIL*

I hope the bork who invented this is now selling ice creams in Norway.

I love you AFTAB AHMED KHAN !!! Thank you so much for solving this threading irritation. I am just wondering however.....why didnt the guys at gmail tell us how to do it ? Were they laughing at us all this time ? (comments on this site started in Aug 2006 !) If so, its pure arrogance.

I still prefer conversation view for most short exchanges but when I could not find an e-mail that I knew I had received today, I temporarily turned off the conversation view and was able to find it in seconds. It had been buried in a thread of 22 exchanges that started weeks ago.

I wish there is a way to turn the "conversation thread" off! I do not know why google has set it in such a way and give me a miserable life!

Eliz, as I mention earlier in the comments, you can now turn off conversation threading in Gmail:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/disable_turn_off_message_threading_conversation_view_google_gmail.html

:-)

Threading is not for everyone and I wish I could turn it off. I can appreciate that there are a lot of users that like the feature too bad these same people cannot appreciate that there are some of us that find it to be a pain in the ass.

Intelligence grows when one is able to see another opinion to have value even when it is not agreed with.

Not only treading (conversation) feature is bad, but there are other design faults.
1. You cannot sort by the field in the inbox.
2. Labels are bad substitute to folders, since they do not allow creating subfolders, which make a list of folders (labels) extremely wide and difficult to manage.
3. With conversation the worst part is that you cannot delete separate messages from the conversation, only the whole group.

I used gmail for a long time....i understand gmail threading and got used to it, and then i started making a series of orders....and i got absolutely crazy, loosing track of time and what is replacing old statements. So, now i am using gmail from an IMAP client, the service is good but the threading is an option that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't...If google doesn't allow to disable it, it's a stupid thing - full stop.

Dude from the last comment - You can turn it off in: Settings - Conversation View.
So simple!

"I don't believe that there's any way to turn this feature off, but since it's such an integral part of Gmail and so darn useful, I suggest instead that you might spend a few weeks trying to get used to it"

I'm one of the millions of people that thinks this 'feature' is stupid, unhelpful, annoying, and anything but "darn useful". If Google can't implement 'features' without fundamentally breaking the way e-mail works, they're worse than useless - they're creating a problem that didn't previously exist.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=5900

"If you'd like, you can change this setting so that replies aren't threaded into conversations, but appear as individual messages in your inbox. To do so, go to the General tab of your Gmail Settings, and select the radio button next to 'Conversation view off'."

You can Turn off Gmail’s conversation view, so that your conversation won't group together anymore

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html

Some like it, others don't, but that's not the point. If you're not going to answer the question, then don't put up a web page about it: you're wasting everyone's time.

The link posted on Feb 17 answers the question.

You can easily turn off Conversations (or thread) by going to Settings->Conversation View Off.

I find it confusing as well. Yahoo, hotmail, and outlook emails are user friendly. I ask to the responsible manager to make the conversation feature an option, so that everyone will be happy. Please! Stop annoying customers.

I have a hard time dealing with threading because I have a disability and I need to have each email separated in order to be organized. I get frustrated and stressed sorting through pages of emails in order to find the one I want. I confuses me and there should be an option to disable this as not everyone is able to work this way. This is a world of diversity and email accounts should be set up this way so all have the same advantages as others. To set up an email account just one way, means that only those who's brains are ok with sorting through pages an pages of emails to find the one they need and those who have a problem with sorting through pages of emails are at a disadvantage. Switching to another email system is not an option for me as I am too invested in the two that I had. I didn't realize it threaded it until it was too late.

Thanks

i hate the stupid conversation threading

google is such a stupid company, it takes years and they still couldn't fix this threading bug

After I forwarded an email from my wife to a few friends of mine; I sent a personal note to my wife, by "ACCIDENTLY" hitting the "REPLY" button to the thread which i sent to my friends (instead to the original thread from my wife). Now what it did is strange: A reply button should send an email to the "SENDER (i.e me in this case)" not the "RECIEPIENT"..it send the note to my friends, which was a personal note intended for my wife. So disappointed in you GMAIL!!

I found a solution to the problem. I have been struggling with this for a while, it is extremely confusing and dangerous (especially when sending quotes to customers connected to a thread with private conversations in the background).
Anyway:
click: settings (it is the gear depiction in upper right hand corner
in the general settings tab: scroll to conversation view and turn it off
it fixes the group email issue

hopefully this works for standard gmail, as I only tried it on a work account

good luck

Just looked up this chain.
Sarah and boomboom both posted the same exact solution.
I apologize for my redundance and/or taking any credit.

It may provide an easy method for Google to organize customer messages for tracking purposes, but it's possible that consumers neither need, nor want such chain-thread-mail tracking, and may find it intrusive and threatening.

Why does Google feel a need to organize everyone's thoughts by imposing its own system of organization on everyone? That isn't Google's job. There needs to be a method to turn it off, or on, when desired. Perhaps it works best for businesses when threads are required for determining liability problems. But, for friends, acquaintances, and relatives, it's annoying.

Here are the instructions to turn it off.

Conversations
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If you'd like, you can change this setting so that replies aren't threaded into conversations, but appear as individual messages in your inbox. To do so, go to the General tab of your Gmail Settings, and select the radio button next to 'Conversation view off'.

Thanks sooo much Eric. It works! I'm rid of those darned conversations. For anyone else who wants to try - go to your mail box, go to options, settings, general tab, and select the option to turn off conversations. BIG THANK YOU TO ERIC

Thank you so much to all the people who posted the solution for this. I DESPISE this feature in Gmail but had no idea I could turn it off. I have now turned off the "conversations" feature and my Gmail is much more user-friendly.

Why did it take so long for everyone to figure this out, Why is it cleverly hidden in the "gear icon?"
Why do I have to search for everyday things like "forward" and "reply"? It should be designed for the imbecile, the novice, not for elitist cryptologists.

Google's services have several features that are ruining my internetting.

The predictive search thing. UGH. Took a while to be able to disable it.

And I miss SO MANY notifications because it groups emails together. It's all well and good saying it's a revolutionary feature that makes things easier, but it REALLY screws with notification systems.

MAKE IT OPTIONAL! MAKE IT OPTIONAL! MAKE IT OPTIONAL! MAKE IT OPTIONAL! MAKE IT OPTIONAL! MAKE IT OPTIONAL!

THANKS THANKS So much to the solution providers ... I was able to turn off threading ... just go to mail settings, then the 6th item right after Browser settings, is conversation settings ... THIS SHOULD BE OFF!

Thanks again ... I like many hate hate conversations or threading ...

Thank you Thank you for instructions on how to disable the "conversations" app.

It has complicated my use of gmail to a big degree.

I've just come from disabling the 'conversations' app.

All the emails are showing by sender, date, and first line of "each" message. Now I can get back to quickly finding the needed email.

As my use is not a social use but rather business use the 'conversations' mode was maddening and certainly not working for me.

Thank you again for showing us how to disable the conversation mode.

Options. We have options. Thank you!

There is a setting to turn conversations on or off. I have it OFF and it still groups them in Thunderbird, it is completely aggravating and I have missed so many emails and had to figure out how to reply to ONE since they are all grouped..

People, the discussion grouping in Gmail happens only for emails that have the same TITLE. It does not apply necessarily to the same people, so if you change subject to the email you are starting a new discussion. It is that easy. When you are talking about Chick Peas title your email that way and all messages will be in the Chick Peas conversation, change title and BAM! new discussion. :)

Also, your inbox always shows how many messages are in each thread/discussion, how many new messages are there and who sent them.

If you don't like Gmail use something else... right?

What i can see is that gmail tends to mess a few things up when you use your account both on android and your home computer, but that's a whole different matter.

Au revoir!

Wow. Thanks for NOT answering the question and telling people that they are too stupid to know what they want. The koolaid is strong in that one. The listening? not so much.

I do NOT want my emails threaded. All I want is a damn timeline. Nothing sucks more than missing an important email because gmail outsmarts me. Tacking it to the end of a thread as reply #13, rather that showing it as unread on a timeline, does NOT add value.

Not sure if you have discovered the answer, but there is a setting to switch this frustrating behaviour off.

In settings, Conversation View: select off.

Thanks Andrew! That should work. All in all, I would like to add (not sure if anyone else has mentioned this), since Google provides the email service for business use as well, grouping is a headache for business users (yeah its free for upto 10 users provided you have your own domain). A business user may provide its customers a "Quote" for their product/services and imagine what would happen if a wrong email is sent to the incorrect customer! The business would bust!.......

Another vote for HATE THIS FEATURE! I have quite a bit of trouble finding specific emails I've sent, or just reviewing the most recent sent because they are buried in long threads often with multiple topics.

For Blackberry users, I have found the following workaround for manual gmail configuration on your BB that has eliminated the Enhanced Gmail Plug-in and therefore Conversation Mode:

http://johndlloyd.com/page/2

Thanks John!

Problem or Question
Cannot find email messages in the Gmail view. The message I want is inside of another email message, making it confusing.

Environment
Gmail

Solution or Answer
Turn Conversations Off.

1. Log into Gmail.
2. Click on Settings in the upper right corner.

3. Under "Conversation View," select (check mark) [x] "Conversation view off."

4. Click Save.

For more information, see http://mail.google.com/support/?hl=en
Cause
Gmail uses a feature called "conversations" which groups or embeds email messages that are in a chain. In this view, one message contains the entire conversation or activity of a message that is replied to or forwarded. This is different from the standard Outlook view where each individual email message is displayed independent of any related activity.

I HATE THIS FEATURE! I want to switch it off!

You can actually turn this feature off. While it is helpful for some uses of email, if you are collecting comments for getting responses from emails sent with the same headline it can really be maddening. Here is how to turn the feature off - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=5900

Gmail now gives the option to separate the conversations/threads having same subject.
Go to Options then Mail Settings then in General tab, find and check the option "Conversation view off".

Regards

I'm with those against this ridiculous, confusing threading. Hate it, hate it, hate it. But like everything else people hate about gmail (lack of a sort function, lack of folders, etc.), Google refuses to listen, fix, or give choices to their customers. I'm off to finally drop-kick gmail out of my life.

Good lord people, go to settings and turn it off conversations if you don't like it. As for me, I can't use email without it at this point. When I get a new email, I'd rather the entire conversation float to the top along with that new email so I can reference what we were emailing about in the first place. Having one stand-alone email come in, and then digging back into history to find the rest of the story is what would be maddening to me. And I'm not alone as I'm sure you've noticed Apple, Microsoft, and even Facebook using the threading/conversation view.

But maybe you still like your email to be disjointed and piecemeal like you're on Hotmail in 1999, so either turn off conversations in settings or chose an antiquated email product and stop whining.

Another thread hater here. If I want to prevent other people from seeing the previous conversation, I have to start a whole new "thread". PITA!! I wish there was a way to hit a button and disconnect the previous conversations in the thread before forwarding or responding to a new person in the chain. Maybe there is one and I'm too dumb to figure it out.

I am quitting Gmail because of the threads...it is so cumbersome and ridiculous. I'm not a baby for gods sake.

HaHaHa...http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html showed me how to turn it off...very easy!

Thanks, Nice job dpmol & Google... http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/turn-off-gmails-conversation-view.html is the solution. I assume it was added and was not there all along.

It's very easy to turn it off. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner. Go to email settings. Go to conversations and click the unlink button.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=5900

This "feature" is an absolute disaster. I have to send the same emails to multiple suppliers however the suppliers definitely should not know about one another.

I now have 10 different suppliers all in the same email and I can't separate the group. Coupled with that they all respond differently and I have no idea what the heck, who sent what when how - god help me what a mess.

If I respond to the wrong supplier and send it to the wrong person it could be my job. Top that off with it being a nightmare to see where in the chain the internal correspondence has to be cut out and it's just unmanageable. What a complete and utter disaster!!!

yes - Now I have to reinvent subject lines 50 times that all should be the same thing and really, should I have to or should I be able to just write an email like ... every other email account on the planet??

PS: I have been using it for six months, every day as my work email. I am not used to it and it doesn't fricken work!!!

PPS: I can't use POP or IMAP as China has blocked these features from working correctly. Throw a 20MB file at it and everything stops.

PPPS: I use a variety of software from Office, Windows, Linux, Mac and don't really mind too much as they all seem to do the same thing to me. If I can send emails, do a doc and some excel I am good.

Its JUST Gmail Web interface! It is the ONLY thing that really just stuffs everything up.

Don't tell me to get used to this s&#t. It doesn't work. END

Apologies to Dave on the post above. The language was not intended to be directed at you.

I simply don't believe gmail to be manageable and personally I am unable to get used to it. Maybe for a lot of people this is a good solution.

My company will be changing providers shortly I believe.

while it's nice that gmail have finally made it easy to turn off 'conversation view', it's pretty useless (to me) without the ability to sort by subject. has anyone found a way to do that?

thanks,
sneeds

Has anyone found a way to turn off threading on the gmail iphone or android phone apps? I could really use it...

I dislike the threading feature and searching for a solution brought me here.

Save a message to a folder then clean your sent mail folder. Hmm, now all of my saved messages are gone as well.

"one of the more desireable features of Google's Gmail service"? Seriously?? This feature is doing my head in! It's the one thing that's stopping me from using gmail as my main email and believe me, I have tried to get used to it, I've been trying for months. It's no good.

Many thanks to Mandi for the link showing how to turn the stupid feature off, shame it's no longer possible to search by subject, good job there are only 3 emails in my inbox (and not likely to multiply either). Bah!

Dave, as this is probably the most visited article on the web about this topic, why don't you just update your original post to say that Conversation View can be switched off and save a lot of people some headaches?

Mea culpa. Fixed.

I like the threading feature, for the most part. What I do not like is that if I save that email to a folder and later someone responds to it, then it pulls it from the folder. If I delete the response email then all the emails are trashed, even the ones in the saved folders. I don't want my folder emails to be trashed because I trashed a response to it.

I also lost a lot of stuff in my folders when I permanently deleted my SENT and TRASH emails. After awhile I noticed that I was losing my emails from the folders too as I was simultaneously deleting the SENT and TRASH emails, and I could not get them back. Arrrggggg!

Any way to avoid this?

Also, I don't care for the new format. Everything is so faded it is hard to tell where one email ends and another begins. Hard to find things. I don't like it at all!!

I have given gmail a lot of time to get use to this "threading" or "conversation" style of email--3 years--and I still dislike it. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with it at work. I WISH GOOGLE WOULD LISTEN TO ITS USERS AND ALLOW A DIFFERENT STYLE. CHOICE WOULD BE GREAT.

I loathe the new gmail. It's ugly, hard to use and feels like I am being slammed against a wall to use email the way Google wants me to, NOT the way I prefer. Make all these unattractive "offerings" OPTIONAL. Do NOT push them at us or we will just move away. At least I will. The conversational "thread" is ridiculous. Maybe we don't want all the records Google wants us to have or have our own way of keeping track, not Google's way. Make it and all the other junk optional. So you designers can play with it. I want to return to the original design -- at least the one pre-this one. I agree with just about all the comments above.

So sick of being told to get used to whatever change some IT guy decided is best. New options are awesome , but let me decide and personalize the services I invest in my using as my primary email address.

Great post! I love to read this kind of stuff!

Thanks!

Marco

Started with G-mail 2 months ago..BIG mistake.
Rather than letting me do what I want, it takes it own actions..which is very, very confusing.
Labels are not as intuitive as one thinks. Then the threading is ridiculous. Can't find content of an old E-mail without wading through tons. If one finds it, can't delete any of the unneeded threads without deleting the whole. Add to that if someone send you even a one word answer to an old E-mail ie "great" it pulls the old e-mail out of the folder and when you delete "great" you've deleter your important (previously in your folder E-mail).
If I can't sort this out soon, have to find a different E-mail system