Re: [Geary] How to disable threading ?

[Manish Jain <bourne identity hotmail com>]

Thanks for replying.

Software modification requests generally under 2 categories : nice-to-have features and features that the user really is unable to do without.

If I were to limit the context to Geary, there are 2 nice-to-have features that I am doing without, not particularly painful : lack of filters to move incoming messages into specific folders, and bottom-posting which is needed for writing to the freebsd mailing list. From my viewpoint, the threading problem is more in the class of "features that the user really is unable to do without". 

Threaded messages are ideal if the number of messages in the thread is just 1 or 2, so you can get to the top message and the bottom message quickly and easily. But that practically never happens. In a thread of 10 messages, if the important message is somewhere in the middle, that important message is hidden in the 'collapse' and the user has to rummage. Most of the times, my experience is it is not possible to know in advance that a message is important - till you actually need to rummage in the 'collapse'. At that stage, you actually become unsure whether the message is there at all - it might have been accidentally deleted, or some such reason.

Every time I have faced this situation, the only solution I have managed to get the message (or be sure that it actually does not exist) is to open up Hotmail in the browser. Maybe I am old-fashioned or not savvy enough; but it certainly bewilders me that threading in Geary is enforced by the developers with no choice for the reader to change the behavior. All that it would have needed was an 'if' block.

It is not that I have not tried to alter my working style to somehow adapt to Geary's threading. But despite whatever I have tried, I am forced to rummage and then search Hotmail in a browser something like once a day. The major problem here is not the frequency, but the amount of annoyance whenever the story gets played out.

I will try something more to address this problem - try using mutt or some commandline tool for searching of mails. That has its own learning curve, but then the curve is the mother of invention.

Thanks again for your response.

Manish Jain

On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Federico Bruni <fede inventati org> wrote:

Il giorno sab 23 lug 2016 alle 2:56, Manish Jain <bourne identity hotmail com> ha scritto:

While the Geary interface is sensational in its appearance, there is a fairly serious problem I am facing - I can't easily locate individual messages because of the threading that Geary employs. For me, the threading problem is so significant that I a few years back I moved from gmail to Hotmail, simply because gmail uses threading. I can't understand how people manage to work with threading - it is a real pain.

I can't understand how people can read not threaded emails :) Reading not threaded emails is like reading 20 books at once, jumping from one to another to another and back to the first, etc. What exactly annoys you about the threaded view? (consider that lots of people use and love Gmail)

Now I use Hotmail, which works very nicely in the browser. But Geary then uses threading to group the Hotmail messages, and it is like the same story starting all over again. Is there any way I can disable threading of my messages in Geary ?

It's not possible at the moment. This is a feature request to introduce a threaded view: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747158 Probably not what you are looking for though.