Some suggestions for improving conversation view

[kijinbear]

Grouping related messages into "conversations" has become a popular feature in webmails and email clients alike. Some people love this features, others hate it, but it's useful when I want to scan a long thread and quickly find out who said what in what order.

FastMail's implementation is mostly okay, but there are a couple of areas where I think they could improve.

1. The list of correspondents always includes my own name, in a seemingly random order. This creates unnecessary clutter and makes it harder to spot the name I'm looking for.

2. Conversations are sometimes split up unexpectedly, like when someone replies individually with a different subject. It would be great if it was possible to merge conversations manually. Like, select a few conversations and click "Merge" in a menu.

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

...The list of correspondents always includes my own name, in a seemingly random order. This creates unnecessary clutter and makes it harder to spot the name I'm looking for...

I assume that by "the list of correspondents" you mean the From address display names shown in the list of messages which comprise a conversation. Those messages are listed by their date/time, so the appearance of your name would be when you sent those messages. That's the whole point of conversation view - you see in order when each person made their comments.

Originally Posted by kijinbear

...Conversations are sometimes split up unexpectedly, like when someone replies individually with a different subject. It would be great if it was possible to merge conversations manually. Like, select a few conversations and click "Merge" in a menu.

I agree that this might be useful in some cases. But you might have several different subjects and would need to decide which one to use for the thread. If you changed the actual subject headers, you wouldn't later be able to search for the messages as they were originally created. So it seems to me that it would be difficult to add that feature in a way which would be consistent and useful, especially if you also read the messages in an IMAP client.

I have more difficulty with people who hijack a conversation and start a new topic without beginning a new thread using a new subject.

Bill

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by n5bb

I assume that by "the list of correspondents" you mean the From address display names shown in the list of messages which comprise a conversation. Those messages are listed by their date/time, so the appearance of your name would be when you sent those messages. That's the whole point of conversation view - you see in order when each person made their comments.

No, I mean the list of correspondents in the mailbox view (list of conversations in a folder, such as "Inbox").

Of course I expect to see the name of the sender for each message, including the ones I've sent, when I'm actually viewing a conversation.

But this creates unnecessary clutter in the mailbox view. For example, I have a bunch of conversations I've exchanged with the same set of people. Some are displayed as "A, B, my name", others are labeled "A, my name, B", and still others show up as "my name, B, A". I guess the order depends on who sent the first message, but this distinction is meaningless to me because FastMail arbitrarily splits a conversation after ~100 messages. (Gmail is slightly better in this respect because at least it shows "me" instead of the full name.)

Originally Posted by n5bb

I agree that this might be useful in some cases. But you might have several different subjects and would need to decide which one to use for the thread. If you changed the actual subject headers, you wouldn't later be able to search for the messages as they were originally created. So it seems to me that it would be difficult to add that feature in a way which would be consistent and useful, especially if you also read the messages in an IMAP client.

Yeah, I guess that could be problem, too.

[n5bb]

Now I see what you meant. I agree that the order of the few names which can be shown appears to be random, but there is probably something we are missing.

Bill