[CentOS] OT: help with email list reading programs w/ best features to read the centos and other lists that can filter people etc

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Thu Sep 1 21:05:20 UTC 2011


On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> True, but why do you care?  Every message stands on its own and
> normally carries any needed quoted context.

Oh, if only that were true all the time and with all posters... ;-)

>  I just read unread
> messages and respond or not.  The only place the history matters is if
> you want to see if the answer you are about to give (or need yourself)
> has already been posted.  But if you are caught up on the unread
> messages in the conversation (which all show at once) you'll already
> know that, and in any case the branches in the history don't matter in
> this regard.

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 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. It is just annoying when I have to scroll through
the entire conversation, scanning every message for relevance. The SNR
can become high within a thread, and it is a pain when all messages
are displayed indiscriminantly.

I am using the gmail interface right now (unfortunately, I'm away from
my laptop since last week), and it is already getting on my nerves in
several threads on Fedora and CentOS lists.

Your usecase is probably different from mine. If you always have time
to read through the whole thread, I agree that subthreading isn't
important. But nevertheless, it's a pity that gmail's web interface
doesn't support this, since there are people (like me) who would find
proper threading very useful. In general I don't complain since KMail
resolves this problem for me, but gmail devs would really gain some
points in my eyes if they would implement real threading. ;-)

Best, :-)
Marko



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