Gmail removes one of the most important reasons I don't recommend Gmail to many

I recently read the threaded view in Gmail was to become optional. I had to investigate and it's true.

First what is threaded view. Threaded view is where emails with the same subject are group together. Let's say for example you email someone, they reply back, you reply back them etc. Google groups all these emails as a thread and you see the latest email and a number in brackets in your inbox.

The problem I've found is most people I've met don't have a clue what is going on. They see the latest email but don't realise there are other emails there as well. For example they may be waiting for a response from one of the people they sent out invitations to, but not realise it has already been received.

Threaded emails appear to be a feature which came across from newsgroups where many people participate and so grouping the conversation together made sense. In emails often it doesn't make sense.

For example I often send out an email and during a course of time there are a number of emails going back and forth. I want to keep some of the emails, but some I don't, so I just delete them. The problem is I didn't realise but when I deleted one of the emails I deleted all of the emails in the thread. So the emails I thought I was saving were deleted. I found this by accident. I didn't understand why the email I remembered keeping wasn't to be found. Luckily it was still in my trash so I could recover it.

Google Gmail has now made the threaded view optional. Yes you can turn threaded view off and to me this improves the usability of Gmail for my user base significantly. To me it is a major step forward. There are still limitations in Gmail that exist which stops me from recommending it for everyone, but this is a major step forward.

In MyAnswers solution 2024 I provide the steps to turn threaded view off. This solution will be available soon.

Kelvin Eldridge