Thank you for not saying that you hate Gmail's threading feature! If you read the comments attached to my article Can I disable Gmail threading? you'll see that people are quite surprisingly passionate about this subject.

As I have said before, however, a bit of poking around reveals how you can sidestep the problem and learn to tolerate, if not actually love, the threading capability to organize your mailbox. Maybe. :-)

In your case, you are correct that clicking on "Reply" will not work because just about all modern mailing lists are set up so that replies go to the list, not the sender. Plenty of people have been embarrassed after accidentally sending personal messages to a large list because they forgot that, but we won't go there, nor will I talk about the times I have done that myself!

Instead, when you have a specific sender to whom you want to send a message that's part of a thread, float your cursor over their name, as shown here:

It isn't completely obvious, but if you now move your cursor over the little "Email" tab and click, you'll get a new message composition window with their email address - not the address of the list - already filled out:

That's the trick. Not so tough, is it? ;-) Note that some people will only have an "Email" tab while others will have a "Chat" tab and still others will have an "Invite to Chat" tab. As I said earlier, experiment, click around, and see what other means you can use to communicate with your colleagues or friends.

Thanks to blogger Dennis McDonald for allowing me to use him as an example.