I fail to see a massive difference beyond extraordinary lazyness there.
"Laziness" is a key component of usability -- nearly all efficiency improvements can be dismissed as "just for the lazy", well back before the dawn of computers. Who needs an electronic starter for their car anyway? Surely a crank handle is fine?
I'm condemning it because it's a step backwards not forwards and affects me, as I have to deal not only with the outlook TOFU idiots but also with the gmail TOFU idiots now. Google of all companies should know better, but "fancy" won over "sensible" one more time.
It shouldn't affect you at all -- you can carry on plodding through your messages one by one in your client, and shaking your fist at TOFU from your porch recliner. But the TOFU battle is (sadly) lost, thanks to Outlook and later Gmail. Increasing client usability isn't going to affect that fight one jot.
Engineers tend to also be the most extensive users of e-mail. Most mailing lists happen between technical people. Many E-Mail Clients are under active development. If conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature then we'd be having it everywhere by now. The implementation effort is minimal.
And yet when you view a Bugzilla thread on the web, you see all the replies in a single page. I agree that if conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature by engineers we'd be seeing it everywhere by now. But this is simply proving to be another case where the use case of the vast majority of engineers is wildly different to the end-user case. Google Groups, as you pointed out above, is also incredibly popular among technical people. You can't see a reason why (though you'll doubtless have something condescending to mention about youth or branding) because you refuse to accept that it may be popular for a reason.
Most MUAs are already tracking "conversations" as you call them and have done so for 20 years.
No, no they aren't, as you'd see if you deigned to take the time to consider what a conversation actually is, an understanding you simply don't have as evidenced by your screenshot above. It's not a dumb subject-based sort, nor is simply header-based or a combination of the two. Crucially, it includes messages sent by the reader -- which is where the work is for the client: it has to sort through the entire local sent archive to render the conversation. Can you name a single client that has done this for 20 years?
Clearly, this a love-hate feature. For the haters, there is ... ooh, every mail client ever. For those who love it, there is, well, GMail. Something's amiss there, especially when adding the feature would barely impact on haters.
It shouldn't affect you at all -- you can carry on plodding through your messages one by one in your client, and shaking your fist at TOFU from your porch recliner. But the TOFU battle is (sadly) lost, thanks to Outlook and later Gmail. Increasing client usability isn't going to affect that fight one jot.
Interesting observation and no, the TOFU battle is in no way lost. It has just become a much more frequent annoyance again recently, after it had almost disappeared for a while. Thanks gmail!
Try posting TOFU to any respectable mailing list and you'll get the appropiate responses. People don't suddenly begin to tolerate idiocy only because a new broken client comes along.
No, no they aren't, as you'd see if you deigned to take the time to consider what a conversation actually is, an understanding you simply don't have as evidenced by your screenshot above. It's not a dumb subject-based sort, nor is simply header-based or a combination of the two. Crucially, it includes messages sent by the reader -- which is where the work is for the client: it has to sort through the entire local sent archive to render the conversation. Can you name a single client that has done this for 20 years?
Well, technically it's quite a trivial problem for any MUA that already has a search index - which would be most of them.
So the question would not be why couldn't they do it but rather why did nobody care to implement it, even years after gmail came along.
Maybe people who care enough to use a desktop mail client just have better ways to organize their stuff?
Maybe people who care enough to use a desktop mail client just have better ways to organize their stuff?
This is what's so perplexing about this argument, and I'm clearly not articulating what I think matters here, unless I'm just getting downmodded for my opinion. Because I care enough to use a desktop mail client, and also dislike top-posting in most cases, and am pretty anal about filing. But conversation view is a great help with all of these areas, and they're where I most keenly feel its absence.
And -- if we can set Tofu aside for a moment as a social problem -- I don't see that adding conversations would detract from the email client experience in any way. Sure GMail did it in a polarising use-it-or-leave fashion, but as an optional extra it makes a great deal of sense to me.
I mean, seriously, consider the other remotely similar forms of digital conversation we have, like instant messaging. Imagine that an IM client forced you to look in a separate place to see what you'd said, and only showed you a single post from your correspondent at once. It's ludicrous. Similarly, compare the iPhone's (or any other threaded) SMS app to the old standard of single-text-at-a-time. There's simply no comparison.
So, no, I don't think it's that "people who care" have better ways, though I strongly suspect they believe they do. Oh well. Perhaps a GMail API will come along eventually.
"Laziness" is a key component of usability -- nearly all efficiency improvements can be dismissed as "just for the lazy", well back before the dawn of computers. Who needs an electronic starter for their car anyway? Surely a crank handle is fine?
I'm condemning it because it's a step backwards not forwards and affects me, as I have to deal not only with the outlook TOFU idiots but also with the gmail TOFU idiots now. Google of all companies should know better, but "fancy" won over "sensible" one more time.
It shouldn't affect you at all -- you can carry on plodding through your messages one by one in your client, and shaking your fist at TOFU from your porch recliner. But the TOFU battle is (sadly) lost, thanks to Outlook and later Gmail. Increasing client usability isn't going to affect that fight one jot.
Engineers tend to also be the most extensive users of e-mail. Most mailing lists happen between technical people. Many E-Mail Clients are under active development. If conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature then we'd be having it everywhere by now. The implementation effort is minimal.
And yet when you view a Bugzilla thread on the web, you see all the replies in a single page. I agree that if conversation views were considered a worthwhile feature by engineers we'd be seeing it everywhere by now. But this is simply proving to be another case where the use case of the vast majority of engineers is wildly different to the end-user case. Google Groups, as you pointed out above, is also incredibly popular among technical people. You can't see a reason why (though you'll doubtless have something condescending to mention about youth or branding) because you refuse to accept that it may be popular for a reason.
Most MUAs are already tracking "conversations" as you call them and have done so for 20 years.
No, no they aren't, as you'd see if you deigned to take the time to consider what a conversation actually is, an understanding you simply don't have as evidenced by your screenshot above. It's not a dumb subject-based sort, nor is simply header-based or a combination of the two. Crucially, it includes messages sent by the reader -- which is where the work is for the client: it has to sort through the entire local sent archive to render the conversation. Can you name a single client that has done this for 20 years?
Clearly, this a love-hate feature. For the haters, there is ... ooh, every mail client ever. For those who love it, there is, well, GMail. Something's amiss there, especially when adding the feature would barely impact on haters.