On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:48 AM, R - elists <lists07 at 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