Re: [Geary] How to disable threading ?

[Marvin W <gnome larma de>]

Hi,

On Sa, Jul 23, 2016 at 10:14 , Manish Jain 
<bourne identity hotmail com> wrote:
> 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".

bottom posting is possible with geary. Well at least there is a sort of 
hack for it: highlight the text of the whole message, than press reply. 
If you highlight only part of the message (e.g. without the footer 
automatically added by the mailing list server), only this part will be 
cited.

> 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.

Or maybe, you're just not used to Geary yet. Geary will not collapse 
messages that are important. If a message is unread, it will not be 
collapsed - it is important because you did not read it yet and likely 
want to. Additionally, if you use Geary's search feature, messages 
containing the searched keyword are not collapsed as well.

With Geary (same for Gmail btw), it is no longer needed to click 
through messages to find the message you are searching for. The 
amazingly fast search will just show you what you were searching for. 
If I wonder about using Geary on FreeBSD, I just search for "Geary 
FreeBSD" and all your messages on this topic will be shown, including 
the thread they belong to.


If a thread is long and you want to find a specific message in a thread 
(by keyword), that's no problem as well. You just press Ctrl-F (I guess 
it's the same on FreeBSD) and type. You can than jump directly to the 
next occurrence of your search term as in a browser. You can also 
search for name of author or e-mail address there, or even the date and 
time.
Pressing Ctrl-F will also uncollapse all posts in the thread 
temporarily (undo by pressing esc).

Thus you have an amazingly fast cross-thread search, and an even faster 
in-thread search. Combining both you can search very efficiently. I 
don't know how searching in mutt or hotmail is done, but I guess it's 
not a lot better.

Finally: you mentioned the awesome appearance of Geary, but the 
"feature" you are suggesting will require you to give up appearance: 
Not using threaded view will make the column-based layout less 
effective (lot of wasted screen space), not using threaded view will 
also make the thread list a message list and thus a lot more cluttered. 
If you don't want all this, you can just go with Thunderbird and modify 
the UI a bit using add-ons/skins/whatever.

Cheers,
Marvin