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.