Google adds option to disable Conversation View in Gmail

By chris v, B2P
Published on Monday October 4, 2010 at 8:38 am ET
Updated 10-4-10, 5:03 pm ET

gmailGoogle’s Gmail email service is the fastest growing email service in the world, and now, the company plans to make it more customizable by finally allowing users to view their inbox messages in an ungrouped chronological format.

Since the company launched the email service six years ago, it would automatically group email messages with the same subject (including with multiple participants) in to a threaded conversation-like view.

Gmail was the first email service to introduce the feature, but many users; in particular users who previously used other email clients such as Yahoo’s Mail service, simply wanted to view their messages in a single chronological unthreaded list.

 Available now, users can switch the default “Conversation View” to “off” from the general settings tab in Gmail, which will simply display inbox messages in a chronological ungrouped list.

Aggregately, Gmail currently has about 185-million users worldwide, about a little more than half of the total users who use Windows Live Hotmail from top rival Microsoft.

Although the feature add-on could sound trivial, millions of users will find it very welcoming and would make the switch. It is hard to believe the company took all of this time to implement the option to allow users to make the change in their inbox.

Google also recently made the Conversation View available on BlackBerry devices as part of an enhanced Gmail plug-in.

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Chris is a graduate from the Art’s program at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is very passionate about photography and art. Write to [email protected]
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  • http://twitter.com/seatowngrrl AnaLuisa Orantes

    in my experience the confusion people find when they first switch is short lived. I have my mom checking her various email accounts through gmail (hotmail being one of them) and at first I asked if she wanted to switch back, but she loved the conversation view so much she just stuck out the issue she was having (which we fixed) and now can’t get enough of it. Next up an android smart phone.

    • Acemcduffy

      I like the conversation view as well, when dealing with companies that you need response from ,post answer and hit reply, ta-da you’re done…really saves time !

  • Mangamaster03

    Over the past few days I have been having a conversation back and forth with someone, about 30 back and forth emails total. I used yahoo for about a year, got an invite to gmail beta, and never looked back. The conversation view seemed natural and I wondered why people didn’t like it. I turned it off, and instead of having my one conversation with 30 responses, I had 30 different emails. I also use gmail’s feature where you can include selected text in the reply, so the entire 30 messages won’t be sent back and forth each time. I absolutely hated it, and immediately switched back. Conversation view works fine and makes sense. What is wrong with it?

    • Drkasal

      I don’t care about whether or not I have threaded view….but the threaded view prevents me from easily sorting by subject, sender and date. Unfortunately, even though I can now turn off threading and get chronology back, I still can’t sort by header. Hopefully some day…

  • Johnsmith

    GMail launched April 1, 2004. That was 6 years ago.

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