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.