On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:48 AM, R - elists lists07@abbacomm.net wrote:
i am suprised that more folks havent spoken up about favorite "threaded email readers" or has everyone just gone to Thunderbird or other similar?
AFAIK, every recent mail client has threading support. They should all basically be feature-complete, as long as you are not asking for something *very* awkward. ;-)
Threads really only matter when responses are slow enough that you forget the context - in which case you probably aren't all that interested anyway.
Or when you are involved in several conversations at the same time, and don't want to get confused. Or when you want your e-mail correspondences (and especially mailing lists) to be sorted in a neat way, like a filesystem tree. It can be very convenient, I am using threaded view in KMail all the time, for all my e-mail activity --- very easy to organize e-mails in an intuitive way. :-)
With thunderbird I normally don't use a threaded view but sometimes flip to it (which is sort of awkward except on a Mac where you can use OS facilities to map a key to a multi-step operation). But in gmail I do like their normal 'conversation' presentation where the previously read messages are mostly hidden but accessible with a click and the unread messages are all opened together with large blocks of quoted text mostly hidden. I'm used to reading 'backwards' in time order so I know what has already been answered, but the gmail view is a little nicer to see the new portion in order and in context.
What I miss a lot in gmail's web interface is proper threading. That "conversation" organization of e-mails is essentially the same thing, only done worse. There is no way to distinguish sub-threads of a given thread. Everything within one "conversation" is being displayed linearly, instead of a natural tree-ordering. When a thread starts to branch out into several directions at the same time, gmail's "conversation" idea becomes worse than useless.
I use a gmail account on a regular basis, but try to avoid their web interface whenever I can. KMail is so much better (for me at least)... ;-)
HTH, :-) Marko