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May
6
It’s official - Gmail’s conversation view is the best way to manage lots of email. Evidence? Well, the internal mailing list that IIM Kozhikode students set up has seen well over a thousand messages in the past three weeks. Almost all those who chose to receive this deluge of email in their Yahoo! webmail inboxes have been unable to deal with the traffic, and have either simply lost track of content and have given up reading it, or have been unable to locate the information they need. On the other hand, those of us with Gmail accounts have had little or no trouble. Although my Gmail inbox has gone up from roughly 2200 email conversations to 3100 conversations in these 3 weeks, I never felt as if I couldn’t manage to read content as it came in, or re-visit the content that I wanted to.
I also carry an offline version of Gmail (via POP3) on Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to create folders and filters all the time to manage the same email that I can easily view without a single folder using Gmail’s browser-based client. Somehow the “view thread” view in both Mozilla Thunderbird and IBM Lotus Notes doesn’t match upto the slickness of Gmail’s implementation. Perhaps that’s because the thread view is an additional feature, an afterthought, whereas Gmail was designed from the ground-up with the conversation view in mind. But it’s pretty certain that the conversation paradigm is the base for future evolution of email management. Conversations are currently the best way to preserve the context of information in an email thread, which is crucial. Lotus Notes does it very well by showing quoted text in a very easy-on-the-eye manner, but most other email clients just don’t compare.
Spot on. Gmail is addictive. To the extent of destroying every other service provider. MS and Yahoo! are possibly surviving only because of their messengers. But with lean, mean Gtalk on the way, who knows?
Very interesting … “MS and Yahoo! are possibly surviving only because of their messengers.”
The only reason I have a Yahoo! account is because of Yahoo! Groups and Y! Messenger. Get rid of that, and you’ve got rid of Y! from my life!
Have you used Real Threading… in a mail reader like Mutt or Gnus (I think even netscape mail reader had it…)? Gmail’s ‘Conversations’ is good, but still not as good as a good implemenation of proper threading. Good threading will provide a complete tree representation of the mails. You would realize the usefulness of that only in really long threads running into hundreds of messages, when you want to kill off subthreads, and skip over some of them and so on…….. Ah.. the memories :0
@Karra:
Ah, threading! I didn’t know Pine or Mutt had this representation - am looking for a good graphical email application that has this kind of view. I was actually in the process of writing a post comparing the conversation view (essentially linear) with how an email conversation actually grows (tree-wise). Guess your inputs have put paid to that!
Aw c’mon! of course Mutt has a beautiful threading view.. why else would I be so lazy to move over to gmail! But yeah conversations rock. The only thing now that I don’t like about gmail is its compose window: I am too used to vi
Thunderbird, and any other Free mail clients should be able to do a good job of graphical tree threading. Check Google images.
Gnus in Emacs is not ‘truly’ graphical, but it runs in X and Windows. Here is a screenshot:
http://my.gnus.org/node/251