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March 21, 2007

tips

Quick tip: thread your mail

Posted Mar. 21, ’07, 4:05 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Tips

threadinginMail.jpg

Since the start of my work here at MacUser, one small and discreet feature of Mail.app has saved me from email overload: threading. Anyone who receives lots of mail, especially back and forth conversations, has got to use this.

What threading does is organize your “conversations” into one convenient entry in your message list. So if you send Jane and John an invitation for dinner, and they both respond, their two messages will get grouped into one entry. You can then expand any message from the entry to read it. Why is this so convenient? Mostly because it dramatically reduces the number of entries in your list of messages. Of course, this won’t save you if you receive many individual messages, but it works great for replies.

Threading is built right into Gmail, and it’s easily enabled in Mail.app by going to the View menu and selecting “Organize by Thread”. As for Entourage (shudder), it has a similar feature, in the form the the “Arrange By” section of the View menu (if you want to mimic Mail’s feature, you’d arrange by subject). Have fun!


8 Comments

Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

Threading is killer: one of those features I don't know how I did without for so long. That said, Mail.app's implementation is not always that smart: since it seems, at least in part, to be based on subject line, I often get messages grouped together from different people from different years, just because they both have a subject line of "Hi."

Count it down to a quirk of my friend's lax attitude to subject lines, but I wish Mail would get a little more thoughtful about threading.

March 21, 2007 4:50 PM
Jack said:

^^that's funny.
I'm real lazy with mail...I should look into how geeky one can get with it as it is starting to pile up with my new job.

Unrelated: Happy to see Vista, and Zune tags getting smaller. I personally am waiting for Leopard and Logic.

March 21, 2007 5:36 PM
michaelant said:

dude! thank you for this! this is going to make my work email SO much better. I'm actually lucky enough to get to use Apple Mail at work, and there is always way too much to handle without resorting to a lot of filing busywork. I'm going to pass on the tip to my coworkers. woot!

March 21, 2007 7:17 PM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

Hey michealant, no problem :) I'm glad you find this useful... it's such a convenient feature in day-to-day usage but it's really well hidden.

Dan, that's funny: it happens from time to time to me too. It's one of those "Huh?" moments...

March 21, 2007 7:29 PM
Oliver said:

Threading in mail.app is useless. I just turned it on and all it did was group mails together with the same subject.. So an email from Peter last week was grouped with an email from Alice that was sent last year... Completely unrelated conversations, but the same subject line.

Gmail does it well, however. And I don't use Entourage myself but it really isn't that bad of an app (I can think of worse apps, even some made by apple) and hardly deserves a shudder.

March 22, 2007 1:19 AM
Jon Harris said:

Great tip Thomas... absolutely brilliant! Very timely too as I'm just completing a project that has generated COPIOUS quantities of email and was beginning to get swamped by it all.

March 22, 2007 2:37 AM
Chris A. said:

awesome tip! just last night i was downloading my gmail messages into mail and was getting bombarded by the amount of replies i get from friends.

March 22, 2007 1:41 PM
KenMarshall said:

I think, that is interesting for all.

April 19, 2007 9:44 AM

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