OT - Gmail doesn't not suck -- was Re: Another XFS Fan

[Joshua Lutes]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:

> Carl Youngblood wrote:
> > Most of my email usage benefits so much from Gmail's conversation view
> > that this relatively minor inconvenience (I still can engage in
> > mailing list discussions without difficulty) is well worth it.
>
> That's a shame because there have been really good, threaded mail
> readers available for years.  Ranked in order of least useful to most
> useful we have:
>
> - unthreaded mail (in the beginning)
> - conversation-style display, which is inherently stateless, except for
> some general common topic (common parent post in other words)
> - threaded mail
>
> Ironically, "conversations" came years after the threaded model,
> probably as a response to broken e-mail clients like outlook which
> refused to set headers to properly thread e-mails (is that still
> broken?).  Conversations, in my opinion, brings the horrid web forum
> interface to e-mail.  Works great for less then a dozen messages, but
> for long threads (anyone on the python official list?) it's unworkable.
>  Forums are the same way.  popular forum topics with hundreds, if not
> thousands, of posts become incredibly clumsy.  Proof of how broken the
> concept is in in how many times a popular forum topic has to be broken
> into new topics, and when people feel they have to "bump" topics if they
> aren't getting the replies they want.  The threaded e-mail model works
> so well at managing this kind of thing.  I only mention all this because
> even on Plug our threads can get kind of long, and I don't know how any
> of you gmail web users deal with it.  At least with a decent client I
> can note that 10 e-mails are hanging off of a post by Stuart, so they
> ought to be good, and ignore the rest!  Or any of you can notice that an
> e-mail from me started a branch and kill the entire thing right there!
>
>
I just delete the emails after I read them if I don't need the information,
so I don't have any problem with threading or unwieldy conversations.  It
also makes it so that I don't mind when people quote others in their replies
'cause then I get some context if the topic is more than a couple of days
old.  I dunno.  I guess I'm eighty percent stupid though.

Joshua