Google has announced that Gmail users can now turn off the “conversation view” that batches emails together, a response to ongoing complaints that threaded email listings were confusing for some people.
Saying that users either “love or hate” the conversation view, Google has finally conceded that not everyone wants their emails organised for them.
“I haven’t had to wade through multiple messages to follow a conversation in years,” said Wiltse Carpenter, technical lead for Gmail in a post on the official Gmail blog.
“Having all the replies to an email (and replies to those replies) grouped with the original message simply makes communicating so much easier,” he said. “It turns out not everyone feels the same way and some of you have been very vocal about your dislike of conversation threading.”
Google said Gmail users could turn off the threaded messaging of via the Settings page, under "Conversation View".
The news comes just days after Gartner research revealed that Google had captured less than 1% of the enterprise email market and the move to allow managers to switch of threaded messages might be designed to increase uptake.
In another discussion of the subject, on its Enterprise blog, Google cited the problems that administrators have in enterprise environments, where the majority of users are more familiar with Outlook's chronological message display.
“I personally prefer threaded conversations, but as an administrator who still needs to support some long-time Outlook users on Gmail, the unthreaded option is like gold,” Google quotes one systems engineer as saying.
The changes to the conversation view settings will initially be available to individuals and to organisations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel.
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