Many email programs have tried to solve the problem of keeping related emails grouped together. For my time, nothing beats the way that Gmail organizes messages into conversations. Here’s how it works.

The picture you see to the right shows you the end result of many back-and-forth emails between me and the good people at Grosh Guitars.

The messages appear to accumulate together and are treated as one "grouped" message when you’re looking at all your messages in your inbox. This works as long as no one modifies the subject when replying.

Here’s a common scenario. You send an email out to a group of people from church, or a sports team, or your team members at work or school. One by one, they reply and before you know it, you’ve got 15 messages all centered around the first email you sent.

In most email programs trying to organize these emails is difficult at best. With Gmail conversations, it just happens. As the emails come flooding back in, Gmail determines that they’re related to the first message you sent by the subject line, and even if 15 messages have come in since you last checked your mail, they will show up as one "grouped" message.

In the picture above, you see that the new conversation appears as one message, but with the number of messages in the conversation in parentheses. To view the entire conversation, I just click that one message and I can see the entire group of related message together. These messages seem to be glued together in GMail and they always show up grouped together.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Google Products, Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.