Staying away from Gmail because you don’t like threaded messages (aka conversations?)

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I tell lots of people about Gmail and by far, the biggest reason I’ve heard that some people don’t like is that all the messages are threaded. All messages, replies, and replies to replies are displayed as a single entry in the conversation index.

Well, not any more. As of Wednesday September 29, 2010 Gmail is offering a feature to allow you to disable the conversations mode and use it like a legacy email system with one line per email message on the index.

If you’re one of the people who stayed away from Gmail because you don’t like the conversations view, you can now find an option to disable this by clicking Settings in the upper right corner. Look for the section that says Conversations View and choose the way you want it displayed. Save your changes and that’s it. If you prefer, you can always go back to the conversations view.

While you’ve probably read all that from the press releases, I wanted to see it, test it, and let you know how this feature really behaves. My questions included:

What happens when you go to individual messages?
Does archive, label, star, etc. allow you to manipulate just one message?
What then happens when you go back to conversations?

The first thing I noticed is that the help screen is not dynamic between the words conversation and message. Everything is still referred to as a conversation.

As for the shortcut keys, they still work the same, j to go down one message, k to go up, x to select, and so on.

Regarding message management, I picked an example with a conversation containing two labels. Removing a single label from one message in a thread and going back to conversations view shows all applicable labels to the thread. if you go back to non-conversation mode, the individual message label settings are remembered. In short, it seems the application does what you expect it to do.

As for me? I love conversations view and plan to stick with it. With so many email messages going back and forth, it’s just made it so much easier to manage in conversations (especially the mute feature.)

If you’re new to Gmail and you’ve just discovered this podcast because now you want to use it because conversations can now be disabled, welcome aboard! I encourage you to go to chuckchat.com and visit the Gmail Podcast website to find out dozens of ways you can be more effective with Gmail.