On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com wrote:
One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the interesting part of the thread.
I guess I've never believed that there would be no interesting posts in a branch with an uninteresting parent or vice versa. Is this a real statistical observation or just a guess?
Well, I don't know how do you define a real statistical observation, but I described the above scenario from my experience from a couple of mailing lists. What I can say is that it happens often enough to be statistically significant (for me, at least). Otherwise I wouldn't even notice gmail's lack of threading. :-)
I typically don't have time to read through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches are mixed together.
Can't say that I really read everything but unless you are way behind you mostly see the individual messages in the inbox anyway without much structure in the unread portion, so you you can decide about most of it based on subject/sender.
You probably check your e-mail much more often than I do. I do it typically once per day, and in one day quite a big number of e-mails gets accumulated on CentOS and Fedora lists (other lists I'm subscribed to have nowhere near as much traffic). Estimating from memory, in 24 hours I receive approximately 15-25 e-mails on CentOS list, and around 40-50 on Fedora list (of course, these numbers may vary widely). That gives me on average around 30ish new posts to look at every day, while I may be interested in just 3-4 relevant ones. If those posts were not sorted properly into threads and subthreads, I would have to look at all of them, which is very time consuming and mostly a waste of my time. When I'm not actively involved in a thread, I make a rule never to spend more than 10 minutes per day for reading e-mail. ;-)
So, no, I typically don't look at individual messages, and rarely ever receive them one by one. What mostly happens is that every thread accumulates 5-10 posts per day, and I want to read only those that I know are interesting for me (those that continue the line of conversation I was interested in yesterday, and new threads with an interesting title). In gmail's interface I just cannot distinguish those two types from the rest, within a single thread.
Also, on a side note, I filter each mailing list traffic to an appropriate folder, so that posts from CentOS and Fedora lists never actually reach my inbox, but rather get into their own folders. I like to keep the inbox for personal communication, since that typically deserves more of my attention. So when someone sends an e-mail to *me*, it comes into inbox. When someone sends an e-mail to the CentOS list, it comes to the CentOS folder, and is put in its proper place in the branch of the thread. When I want to read CentOS mails, I just switch to that folder, and see all the relevant and irrelevant threads and branches at a glance, without even looking at the text of any individual message. Then I read just the ones tagged as interesting, and mark the others as irrelevant (if they are not marked already).
Back in the day I used to read everything, and it took me one hour every day. After some time I learned to be more efficient in e-mail reading. :-)
But I believe we are getting too tangential to what the OP wanted to know... ;-)
Best, :-) Marko