There something not right about the message threading system in Mac Mail.app. Have a look at this screenshot:
I have messages with the typical subject line, “Checking in”. As you can see, it’s threading messages I sent and received yesterday with messages from four and six months ago. What’s more, there are three different sets of recipients. There is no way that this is a continuation of the same conversation.
So here’s a design to steal to improve threading:
- if the subject is the same but the recipients are different, consider it a different thread.
- If the recipients are the same, and the subject is the same, but a lot of time has passed, take a look inside the message. If there is little or no quoting of the earlier messages ( As happens when messages are replied to), then consider it a different thread.
[Readers: Is this problem present in other mail programs? Please comment. And, as usual, if you know someone at Apple, please send them this feedback.]
This is a problem with Apple Mail.app being a bit aggressive with threading.
There is actually a standard header for this (“In-Reply-To” — for example, “In-Reply-To: “).
Unfortunately not every mailer in the world adds this header so mail application developers try to get fancy. Like so many other design choices, Apple always shoot for fancy over basic.
The same problem appears in Gmail (or at least I’ve seen it in Gmail)… I don’t know if this is a “fancy” solution as David suggests or simply a conservative solution.
I recently read an article explaining how people are much more satisfied with wrong results if they understand how the results were reached than wrong results from a process they don’t understand. If we assume even a modest 5% false positive with Philip’s suggestion, it might create more frustration than twice as many false positives in something I understand (i.e., just using the subject line).
On the other hand, it might simply be the easy thing to do from an engineering perspective. I’d imagine the subject line is pretty well indexed in any email client, so it should be relatively simple to correlate when organizing thousands of messages for a view (not everybody subscribes to zero inbox after all).
The same problem appears in Gmail (or at least I’ve seen it in Gmail)… I don’t know if this is a “fancy” solution as David suggests or simply a conservative solution.
I recently read an article explaining how people are much more satisfied with wrong results if they understand how the results were reached than wrong results from a process they don’t understand. If we assume even a modest 5% false positive with Philip’s suggestion, it might create more frustration than twice as many false positives in something I understand (i.e., just using the subject line).
On the other hand, it might simply be the easy thing to do from an engineering perspective. I’d imagine the subject line is pretty well indexed in any email client, so it should be relatively simple to correlate when organizing thousands of messages for a view (not everybody subscribes to zero inbox after all).