Gmail Conversations in Apple Mail
One of the most highly praised features of Gmail’s web interface is its ability to display emails as conversations, “threaded” so to speak, with emails, your replies and the responses of others all listed together. I don’t use Gmail’s web interface at all, but I read on Phil Wilson’s blog that the Gmail implementation has its problems.
Viewing emails as a conversation is nothing new to Apple Mail users. We have it for all our mail, not just the messages in a Gmail account. A recent tip on macOSXHints, and the comments on it, has thrown up three ways to do this:
1. Create a Smart Mailbox with everything in your inbox and outbox. (Assuming you don’t clean out your inbox into an ordered archive with Mail Act-on). Select “Organize by thread” from the View menu, and – hey presto – conversations, ordered by subject!
2. Control click on as many mailboxes from the list on the left as you would like to include in the conversation view. Mail will select all the ones you control click on and display all the messages in the message list at the top. Select “Organize by thread” from the View Menu, and the conversations are there. This seems the simplest way to me, and is what I do.
3. An “old school” comment recommends sending a BCC of everything to yourself which you can then store in the same folder as the email you replied to. This helps when archiving whole conversations together. Again Organizing by thread helps.
More thoughts on Gmail and Apple Mail’s threading practices on the creativebits blog.
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September 16th, 2005 at 6:40 am
Mail.app threading is OK, but it doesn’t seem to play so well with searching the way this does with GMail: if you search for a message then the results are not organised by thread (and the option on the view menu will not be active). This does rather undermine the utility of threading if you like the GMail-style search oriented mail archiving.
September 16th, 2005 at 10:39 am
Good idea — so I incorporated in to MailTags — Version 1.1 will have a button on the search slice that will search both to and from fields and list items. Just type in the name of the person on the other side of the conversation into the find field, select the “conversation” button and you have a listing of back and forth messages.
January 31st, 2006 at 1:21 am
[...] Luckily, Mail.app does a very good job of producing threaded Gmail-like conversations. (Even better with MailTags). [...]
January 31st, 2006 at 5:42 am
Thunderbird fans will at first claim that this is possible in Thunderbird too, however when they try to implement it they’ll find that Thunderbird only supports threading in saved searches if the saved search only searches a single mailbox. :( This is a really sucky limitation. (bugzilla?) It means that if you have a separate Sent folder there is no way to cleanly union your sent messages with your received messages without physically moving Lthem to the same folder (yes, a BCC trick will suffice, though that’s hokey). Boo!
So props to Apple Mail for very general thread support. My mouth waters when I think about it.
However, does Apple Mail support “Grouped by Sort” like Thunderbird does? (I’m on my office PC now, so I can’t check myself)
In Thunderbird, you can sort by something (example: label or recipient) and then hit “g” to “Group by Sort.” The result is a tree view of all of the set of all things in the sort category. Each group thing can then be expanded to show all of the messages grouped underneath it (and it appears to sort each of those messages by date; I would rather it sort by the previous thing I was sorting by).
(NOTE: This too only works in saved searches if you are only searching through a single inbox. ALSO NOTE: Grouping by Sort does not work with “View:” as you would expect. If you want to group a view by sort, you’ll need to create a saved search)
Here are two example screen shots. In the first, I’ve grouped by label (these are GTD-style labels). In the second, I’ve grouped by date. Notice a problem with grouping by date is that automailers that didn’t take the time and effort to date their mail end up getting shifted into the “Old Mail” pile. :(
http://links.tedpavlic.com/images/hawkwings_tbird_gsort1.png
http://links.tedpavlic.com/images/hawkwings_tbird_gsort2.png
Something that I think is nice about this is that you can implement something that LOOKS and FEELS a little like kGTD right within Thunderbird. Store all your actions in one box (Inbox, perhaps, or a GTD folder) and then create saved searches that actually do NO filtering. In each copy of the box, sort by something different. Sort by label in the GTD folder. Sort by recipient in the “Actions” saved search. Sort by subject in the “Projects” saved search. Now in all three folders, group by label.
Now implement TkGTD by setting up e-mail forwarding (if you have your own domain, wildcard forwarding will work great) from addresses representing each of your contexts to your main address. (add those address to your address book with a context nickname to make the display prettier) When you want to send yourself a new action to add to your GTD database, e-mail the appropriate context (“errands”, “desk”, “work”, “office”, etc.) and start the subject with a project identifier (perhaps prioritized with symbols at the front). When the e-mail arrives, label it appropriately (TBird has 5 labels: Action/Defer/Waiting/Respond/Read). Use the “flag” to mark next actions.
Now clicking on your “Actions” folder lists all of your actions grouped by context. Clicking on your “Projects” folder lists all of your actions grouped by project. Clicking on your “GTD” folder lists all of your actions grouped by action type (action/defer/waiting/etc.).
All that’s missing is recur/reset… Otherwise it’s kGTD. (without the fun iCal syncing)
January 31st, 2006 at 5:47 am
NOTE: I know that you can just create saved searches of that GTD folder for each of those groupings. However, I like being able to click on ONE thing (“Actions”, “Projects”, “GTD”) to get a summary rather than going through a slew of saved searches.
September 28th, 2006 at 8:46 am
[...] I hesitated about posted this, but sometimes the tips that you think everyone knows are the ones least well-known, like using ⌘] and ⌘[ to cycle through the available HTML, Rich Text and plain text views of an email, or using Gmail-like “Conversation” views in Apple Mail. [...]
March 19th, 2011 at 1:23 am
While I use Apple Mail’s Organize by Thread functionality, I think it’s a stretch to say it’s the same as Gmail’s conversion view for a couple of reasons.
What I love about Google’s conversation view is that your inbox doesn’t fill up with all of the individual messages, but rather just shows the latest in the thread. Search still searches all of the messages, of course, and you can get to them. But I’ve found no need to see all of the individual messages (the way Apple’s Mail does when you expand the thread) separately.
The main thing that I love about Gmail’s conversation view which Apple’s Mail doesn’t provide is threaded previewing. While Mail will group the threaded messages in the list together, if you select the whole group it just shows you the from, subject, date, etc fields and you have to click them to open the individual email. This isn’t threaded messaging, it’s just grouping a list. If you’re text messaging app on your phone grouped your texts but didn’t show them inline you wouldn’t call that threaded messaging.
What would help this view a lot would be if, instead of just filling the preview window with a list of messages when you select the whole thread, Mail would show you the messages, one after another so that you can skim the whole conversation without opening each individual message.
Like I said, I use Mail’s Organize by Thread feature and think it’s ok, but it’s still a far cry from Google’s conversation view. Until I find a plugin or upgrade that will allow me to do that (Lion?) then I will still argue that Gmail’s conversations are far, far superior.