Why can't I turn off conversation threading in gmail; it's fatal for my business!

It's true, there are numerous contexts where threading is a hindrance not a help. Since emails that share the same subject line are grouped, it is far too easy to miss messages that are unrelated.

For instance, there have been times in the past when I've sent many customers an update message or have used the same subject line generically ("Hello from Thor!"). Every reply becomes part of the thread even though the subject matter ranges all over the place. Visually it is a lot easier to miss messages when they're buried in a busy thread. I have often missed important messages because of this.

In short, it would be nice to be able to turn off threading. But what Adam says is true, we can always work around the feature by using a desktop (or mobile) client that doesn't maintain the threading. The IMAP feature is awesome from what I've seen.

Why not assign a SID when communicating with a client!

Adam, I would say it would be useful to get Gmail to work as a CRM SID as an optional functionaality by user request.

This will be a great contribution to bring Gmail as a business solution.

So maybe a check box when replying an email with two selective options to process by topic or by sid.

It would be extremly easy to implement without major modifications of the platform. Just set a limit of carachters to thread a topic and the sid becomes the topic!

"Visually it is a lot easier to miss messages when they're buried in a busy thread. I have often missed important messages because of this..."

I'm afraid I just learned that I missed several important emails over the past three days. I am new to Gmail, and I'm surprised that we can't view messages in a more traditional format.

I would prefer not to use another email client, as I use several different machines throughout the day here at the high school where I work, many of which do not allow downloading and installation of email clients due to network restrictions designed to thwart student-initiated damage.

Am I missing something obvious within Gmail that would alert me that a new response has been received in an existing conversation? I only found the missed responses by clicking into each one of my previously read messages and looking for new responses.

I've had this happen numerous times, though I've definitely become sensitized over the years to the interface cues. Basically when there's a new response the thread jumps to the top of your inbox and regains its bold "unread" status. If it's a long thread the previous messages will be collapsed so that the most recent message isn't pushed down too far, but otherwise you do need to scroll down.

I've found this problem is the worst when there are a tremendous number of replies, and the replies have little to do with each other. It's also a problem when the subject line is generic.

I'm so new to Gmail, that I hadn't quite registered the visual cues (boldface, etc.) Thank you for the tip.

I was bewildered to discover that one of my "missed" responses was actually three separate replies to my one original message. In my previous email environments, these three separate replies would appear as three separate messages at the top of my Inbox. Not so in Gmail, I guess.

Thank you again.

I've had this problem too. I used the account for conference registration and we just lost track of what messages we received or moved on to another account. For some reason I never found out, one submission didn't show up at all, although we found it afterwards when searching for the name. We missed 2-3 submissions because of the thread system, and had to do extend the review process with 2 weeks. I think the conversation system only works for very specific contexts, and it should not be the only interface or even the default one.

I've got this problem as well!

Why can't I just choose "unthread conversation" as an option in Gmail? Now I gotta install ANOTHER client on my PC, JUST so I don't have to have email threads? Ugh!

Gmail does SO much, how difficult would it be for the developers to enable users to "turn off" this feature, as opposed to driving us to add MORE software to our already bloated PC's? (Which I cannot do at my job, since I'm not allowed to install software on their machines.) I thought that Google was all about web functionality???

Conversation threading is an essential feature of Gmail, and most of the time I love it.

The one time it's completely unworkable is when I want to delete / label specific messages within a thread. Since I like to populate my to-do list from Gmail tags, it's helpful to see the specific email with action item tagged, rather than the entire conversation thread.

I just don't understand why Google has to be such a Nazi about it. Is it their way or the highway? I too have lost emails because of this. I have been to their headquarters. Maybe because it looks like they are all treated like little children with primary colors and lets decorate our desks...etc. that the engineers feel the need to treat us as children. What is with this "how does it make you feel?" what am I 6 years old?

I have had enough of Google mail, this forced conversation thread thing has driven me to Yahoo!, and it looks fantastic! I dont know why I did not do it sooner, perhaps because google is my default search engine, but now I will move mail completely to Yahoo and use googlemail as a backup.

Try Yahoo, it works as I would want/expect.

Cheers,
Mark.

I agree Mark. I started the thread about this problem but I finally snapped and went to Yahoo also. Yahoo is far superior for this reason alone but I also like their folder system. Whew.

If you want speed and searchability then Gmail is far superior. The fast, comprehensive search mostly makes folders/labels unnecessary for my fast-paced life. I know many people like the Outlook foldered approach, which Yahoo Mail emulates well, but I do love my Gmail.

This converstation threading is absolutely diabolical. I live in constant fear of replying to the wrong people, missing a response to an email (as it lumps 200 responses from 1 group email into the same thread), missing a hardware failure notification etc.
I find it totally unmanageable, even after 6 months of persevering with it. The old standard interface is 1 million times better for me.

Hi Cupcake, yeah, its awful, so change to Yahoo Mail, I did and get my gmail forwarded there. It has folders, filters etc... Ive changed to Yahoo Mail pro, only $20 a year and worth it...

Yes, I have had it with google threading. It makes you miss emails. Reply to the wrong people. I have waited paitently for google to make it an option (2 years!). It is obvious that they think it is a plus. Most people don't know how to complain about it!

I get complaints everyday, and there is always astonishment when I have to say there is no-way to disable the feature.

Onward to test Yahoo.
rlt.
comeandget.us

Sometimes, I just need to exchange a piece of information with a colleague for a later date/time.

Perhaps I'm just not with it...
I don't need every single message to become an episode in a soap opera.

Perhaps they should rename it D-mail for "Drama"

Like so many I also feel that the compulsory conversation threading is more of a headache than a blessing. Perhaps if it could optionally be used on a per-subject basis or something along those lines it might be helpful on occasion. The only other option from the GMail side of things is to use the GMail filtering or "tagging" feature. However this still needs much development as it is largely unsatisfactory in it's functionality. The best option that I have found at this point is to use a third-party email program such as Outlook or Thunderbird. I had abandoned Thunderbird awhile back, but recently revisited Thunderbird when I was looking at paying another hundred-something-dollars for outlook when I bought a new computer. Thunderbird has come a long way in it's functionality and at this point I don't think I will have to look at a different email program ever again. Anywho ... back to the subject at hand. Utilizing a third-party email program to access GMail gives you maximum control over your email and bypasses the compulsory GMail conversation threading.

I just deleted an important thread by mistake due to the threading.

I am reminded of the CorelDraw clipart manual.

One year there must have been an ideologue of some sort in charge of the CorelDraw clipart manual. The previous year's manuals had pictures to represent the topics of different sections of the clipart, along with words for the topics in English, French, German and a few other languages. On the year of the pigheaded designer, the text was removed, leaving only pictures to find the topics with, to make it more politically correct by not picking 5 or 6 out of all the languages in the world to include and thereby excluding all the rest. This of course made it much harder to find topics.

The next version's manual reverted to the old, far superior topic headings with both pictures and words in multiple languages. The pigheaded decision was overturned in favor of giving users what they want and need.

I suspect that in order for Google to overturn it's pigheaded "threaded only" decision will require the person responsible for the error to quit, get fired, die, or otherwise leave their job and get replaced by someone who wants to give users what they report they want and need.

The reason google search works so well is that it give people what they want. Why cant they do the same with email? Do they have a We can do no wrong attitude?

If they did a simple survey, they would find enough people want this feature in addition to a sort by date, time or sender. Geez, yahoo has that. So does it make any sense that yahoo mail is so much more popular?

Wake up please.

I am so relieved to find this thread - I feel like I've reached a support group! I live in San Francisco and met a gmail developer through friends. I asked him how to turn of the conversation feature and he flashed - he went into a tirade and actually referred to me as a "stupid outlook user".
I had switched to gmail a few months ago when I left my isp and got an iphone all around the same time. I have my own domain, so I figured I'd just route everything through gmail and pick it up through Mac Mail at home or iphone clients. It worked beautifully! Trouble is, when I'm away from my client and want to access my mail through a bigger screen than my iphone, I'm stuck with the gmail format. I had no idea I could not shut off the conversation feature, now I feel married to it. It looked like such a good idea at the time. I've lost or missed communcations as described above, but also lose temporal context in the email string: If someone sends a separate message on the same topic but with a different subject line, say we're planning a get-together, I have to go into that conversation and the other conversation(s) and try to stitch together who said what when in response to whom. It's diabolical. It's inane. I mean, how hard is it to sort by subject?? If that's what I wanted, I'd do it. Google: Turn it off. how integral can it possibly be? If my mail client can to it, so can you.

I feel the same way as most of you do. I thought that Google was about letting you do things your way - oh wait, that is Burger King.
It is frustrating that such a good company has decided that this feature is better than what I do now and has decided to force me to use it. I sent them a suggestion to allow the option to turn it off - through the comment link in the reply, and I referenced this thread. I hope that it does some good.

I did try to get used to the threaded conversation feature, but after a couple of years I keep having problems with this feature, which just recently resulted in sending a wrong message to the wrong people a couple of times.
I wonder why Google is taking an arrogant and non user friendly approach on this!

The IMAP suggestion is not solving my problem because of firewall limitations, so this forces me to abandon GMAIL.

Metoometoometoo. I set up my Gmail account with an invite as soon as they launched it. I use it for backup of data and as a test email account. I've been waiting to make the switch until they provide unthreading, for all the reasons listed above. But I lost hope a long time ago. Google has too much power now to really pay attention to user needs. Power corrupts. Too bad!

Like many others, I'd appreciate the option to turn OFF conversation threads. I like web based e-mail access, and G-Mail's integration with Blackberry, but the threads are a nuisance.

I signed up at Zenbe.com, which provide POP3 access to my gmail from anywhere via the web, without having to install any software, and allows me to see the maill by order received. Zenbe also let's you access facebook and other such things, has a calendar-todo-list application, etc.

Do you know of something web based like Zenbe that uses IMAP?

Zenbe says IMAP support will arrive sometime.

I can't really tell when using it for my somewhat limited purposes what difference it would make for it to be using IMAP instead of pop.

I've tried using gmail. It's faster than yahoo and has some great features. I love a lot about google in general ie. gmaps etc.. I retried it again starting a month ago. I just missed yet another email in "pile" in the inbox.

But it's waaaaayyy to easy to miss an email visually. The bottom line is that all of the arguments for gmail or any of it's features don't mean very much when you've missed the original email due to threading feature.

I understand why or how a company could develop something like gmail and not foresee how a feature would affect people. What's annoying is how many people hate this feature (there are reams of complaints on the net) and gmail continues to ignore it.

I don't know about anyone else but many, maybe most of my emails, consist of a message and a reply or two. I certainly don't want every conversation with someone "linked"!

I've used Yahoo mail for years. It's not perfect and isn't as "techy" as gmail. On the other hand, it works just fine w/o installing IMAP or anything else.....

Why fight it?

GMail is a great service and has made my life a whole lot easier. But as a developer myself i must say that not having the ability to unthread is a big hassle. Especially for my bug reports, which customers always label the same...
Also gmail easily thinks of unrelated mails with similar titles as one conversation, when in fact its more... This is a big problem.

Thanks you !

I personally don't have a problem with it. However, I think they should listen others do.

What are the free alternatives to Gmail that don't have hideous moving ads and massive spam and a terrible spam filter like for example Yahoo mail does?

RE: Suezanne Baskerville's comment.
Honestly, why not just go to yahoo mail? I know it's slower at times but what's worse, losing emails entirely or having a couple of ads on the page? If it's that important, you could probably just pay the $20/yr to dump the ads?

I've found a good alternative to gmail. You can try it out in gmx.com. It has free IMAP, POP3 access just like gmail, but without the threaded webmail interface.

GMX has ads with pictures in the emails, right? I couldn't tell from looking if it has video ads or still images. Gmail's text ads off to the side aren't too annoying to me.

Yahoo's spam filter sucks.

Does GMX allow you to see a threaded view when you want?

True threads are made from replies to replies to replies, not just matching subjects

I'd like to see the incoming mail by order received or order sent, as I choose, and then for any particular message, have a option to see the thread the message is in, in forward or reverse sequence.

SuezanneC Baskerville said:

Yahoo's spam filter sucks.

FYI. I don't know if you email a lot more than I do but I've never had trouble with more than an occasional spam email using the free version. The paid version includes an additonal 35 filters.....

Best wishes.

I am sure thousands of users just give up on gmail because of the threading "feature". I expect I will. It's jaw-dropping arrogance by G to ignore the requirement to have a normal inbox.

This thread will go down in the annals of Internet history as one which displays that Google DO NOT LISTEN TO USERS. With great power comes great arrogance, they are rapidly becoming the new Microsoft and underestimating the importance of the user community, as an Information Architect myself I can confidently say that the 'conversation view' has more holes than Swiss cheese and is fundamentally flawed. Google cannot change the habits I have built up using email since before they decided to exist, and it is pompous to think otherwise.

I have moved to yahoo.
not as fast, but it behaves as I would like an email programme to behave WRT NOT threading messages.
Poor show Google. Take your collective heads out of your behinds!

I also hate this feature. I have commented numerous times on Gmail's useless help site, and get no response. I have too many people who use my email address for me to dump gmail, but I am advising everyone I know to not get a gmail address. I stop strangers on the street just to tell them how bad gmail is. Well, not yet but I am thinkong about it.

Why is Google so arrogant about this?

I can only assume now that the reason for Google's resistance to repeated user requests for a conversation view off option is stubborn pride:

probably a view individuals there in the google tech dept who - as the creators of this "unique" feature - are loathe to back track in any way on "their baby" and feel that more time exposure will simply force "stubborn" users to "just get used to it" whereby eventually reducing the number of complaints. This apparent attitude smacks of immaturity.

Google shoudl not allow apparent personal emotion to override public service delivery - the fact is, a large proportion of users (current and potential) DO IN FACT experience difficulty in locating previously sent or received messages because conversation view hides them.

Surely Google realizes that it can attract more users - and keep them - by not continuing to ignore or play down complains in this regard?

I agree completely with Arthur,

Placing such a limitation without the option to have messages threaded or unthreaded way DOES seem like the stubbornness of some self-important Google wanker who is protecting HIS precious VISION (pleeeze, spare us your vision!!!) at the cost of an option that a lot of users are begging for.

Oh dear, will Android go the same way, or will Gmail start listening???

I suggest you all go over to Google and make a feature request, it may help, you never know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil you know!

http://services.google.com/feedback/g...

I'm not saying don't do it, but don't expect much by actually appealing to Google in a sensible way. I've posted over there as have many others.
| wouldn't waste too much time - Go post and then take a shot at Yahoo mail or something like it.

I HAVE THIS PROBLEM -
I just set up a Gmail account because STUPID MSN randomly blocked email to my girl's Hotmail for a few days recently...
so I sign up, thinking Gmail would be the coolest solution -
then I notice the STUPID permanent threaded discussion feature, my girl is complaining that she can't find stuff, and I spend FAR TOO MUCH time looking through the account/settings to find out how to turn the STUPID (to me) THREADING off. So here I am, wasting time, looking for another email solution. Sorry for yelling, but WHAT THE H***, Google? This is just silly.

What's ironic is that the Gmail message threading works at its absolute worst with Google Alerts. They are all clustered together as if they're a thread, when each one is an independent message. When you get hundreds of alerts a week for a single keyword search, it becomes nigh impossible to delete a single message, to find the most recent one, or to scroll through the long overlapped headers.

For its message threading, Google gets an F- for interface design and an F- for customer service. The failures of Google are many but never has one been so easy to fix.

can't someone build some kind of a greasemonkey thing to unthread the emails? Or, maybe we can ask the bettergmail FireFox extension people to do this?

I both love and hate the threading. It's useful for a helpdesk so other users of the account can quickly see what's been written before them, but on the other hand, when several msgs are replying to one mass mailing, all with a different problem, it becomes a nightmare to figure out who needs what remedy. Labels help, but we still risk replying to the wrong person and overlooking responses.

My solution has been to change the subject when I first reply to a message in this case. That breaks the thread.

I hope, though, that a future Gmail release will include the ability to break msgs out of a thread on a case-by-case basis.

I agree with a lot of people here, let me the user choose if I want threading or not. Please!!

I definitely miss the option to Regroup conversations at my convenience.

Most of the time Gmail conveniently groups the conversation in a useful way, but other times it groups stuff that it shouldn't, making it harder to find information inside the thread.

So here is my vote for a better conversation management.

I don't believe Google when they say most people love conversation view. They need a reason to justify their R&D costs, and instead of admitting the truth, they claim people love it. But conversation view is a "feature" users either love or hate, and I suspect you can find more people who dislike this feature than like it. And for every review that praises Gmail, you can find one that faults Gmail for this feature. Unfortunately Google is a stubborn company who refuses to offer an alternative.

I too find this frustrating. I use Google apps to host email for my business and personal domains, and also have a number of customers running on this system. The only downside to this fantastic product, reported to me by customers, is that the conversation view can be confusing.

The best thing we can do is tell Google by checking the 'Switch Conversation View on or off' option on their Gmail Feature Request page: https://services.google.com/inquiry/g...

They can make conversation view 100x better by simply hiding sent messages, so it only groups the incoming messages.

I to have lost emails because of the conversation view. Switched to accessing via Outlook and Thunderbird using pop3. IMAP would not let me exclude folders on gmail(eg I didnt want to sync the spam folder and even though it was told to exclude it gmail kept downloading material from the SPAM folder. At this point the webmail interface for Gmail is useless for me while conversation view cannot be turned off.

There is actually an option to exclude IMAP folders via Gmail settings. I haven't lost messages because of conversation view, but I don't like the Gmail decides how I'm supposed to read my messages. Seriously, who is Google to decide what messages belong together? It's fine if it takes an educated guess, but there must be a way to change this.

It's quite extraordinary that so many people are complaining for such a long time about this feature, while it would be the simplest thing to allow users to just turn it off. I simply love gmail: the most efficient and reliable spam-filter, enormous amounts of free storage, fantastic accessability. I simply don't understand why they keep butting their head against the wall about a simple thing like this, which is obviously a nuisance to a large amount of users.

This is the most commonly requested change to Gmail, so Google is aware of it. They haven't done anything about it because they want Gmail users to do things the way they dictate. One of my biggest complaints about conversation view is that Google decides which messages belong to a conversation, but don't provide a way to break a conversation or train Gmail if they get it wrong (I constantly get messages grouped together that shouldn't be).

I just have to chime in here... I really tried to stick with Gmail for the features that come for free (I've been a $20 a year paying yahoo mail plus user for years) but after a few months of missing important emails (that were stuck in the middle of some other thread like others here have said) and things being grouped that shouldn't be, I left Gmail and went running back to Yahoo, begging for forgiveness.

I would rather pay Yahoo $50 a year instead of being subjected to grouped conversations. The bottom line - this feature is severely broken and if you rely on email for your living, threaded conversations can cost you money if you miss emails or send some info to the wrong client. I am always afraid that I'm sending things to people that are not meant for their inbox since I can see the other emails when I'm forwarding or something. It's just impossible to get used to (for alot of us).

The main reason I pay money at all for email is that I handle multiple email accounts for business and personal emails and being able to send FROM these addresses in Yahoo Mail makes life a bit easier. Google offers this feature for free, but being tortured by grouped messages ISN'T WORTH IT!!!

Another thing that Yahoo does better is folders. Since I have work and personal email on the same page, in Yahoo I can just NOT look into my work folders if I don't want to see who's bugging me, in Gmail with labels, it's all right there in your inbox plain to see so your eye catches a work email at 10PM and the next thing you know, you're thinking about work (or even working)!!!

I'm amazed that Google hasn't put a button in the options saying "Disable Grouped Conversations" - we could have all avoided this waste of effort trying to convince Google to let us turn the darn thing off. WE WANT EMAIL TO BE LIKE IT'S ALWAYS BEEN.... one message for every email sent or received. No grouping. Period.

Remember that Google sells ads that are delivered to each user based on the content of the users' emails. Perhaps grouping messages together increases the value of these ads somehow. This would explain why our cries seem to be falling on deaf ears. Maybe disabling grouped messages would COST GOOGLE MONEY. Think about it.

I actually like Gmail's labels instead of traditional folders. The reality is that labels and folders do the same thing, they are just presented differently to the user. Instead of moving messages into folders, you just apply a label. Then you select the label instead of selecting a folder. The big advantage of labels is that you can apply more than one label to a message.

Labels are great, and it's a good thing you can have multiple labels because you can't just label one message... the whole thread of unrelated messages gets labeled too! Which just makes this whole problem of unwanted threading that much worse...

Again, it should be optional on a per message/thread basis.

That's another downfall of Gmail... You can't label individual messages inside a conversation, only the whole conversation. One of the underlying problems is that Gmail doesn't treat individual messages as individual messages.

I empathise and sympathise with Joe U. I am new to Google, I cannot load Hotmail into Outlook/Outlook Express to use off-line so I thought I would try Google. At first I was impressed but as the mails built up the randome threading drove me nuts - even these replies are not grouped! I too miss the folders I use in Hotmail, maybe Jay's way of working them is worth trying. The targetted adds also un-nerve me very much, though some of the associations are quite funny. The bottom line is that I will be dumping Google asap!
Frogman

Peter/Frogman, Microsoft stopped supporting Hotmail in Outlook Express at least a year ago. Regular Outlook shouldn't have a problem. Outlook Express has been replaced with the freely available Windows Live Mail (not to be confused with Windows Mail that's included with Vista). Windows Live Mail supports Hotmail and it functions beautifully -- also syncs with your Hotmail Calendar. Also free POP3 access is coming (to US users) this month.

Yesterday Google updated Gmail with a "Move To" menu option that basically makes labels function more like folders. They still haven't done anything about conversation view though. =(

The google conversation is basically broken. If you miss or lose emails then you have a bug, not a feature.

I have been investigating moving my company to gmail and google apps as we've had success with other on-line applications (CRM and accounting). But all our faxes come through email and guess what - gmail thinks this is a conversation. Other notifications are treated similarly and lost. I've pulled out of google apps and being a paid subscriber because of "conversations". They've lost my money and some of my respect.

Just found out about the Google Labs feature "Quick Links" which allows bookmarking the search "subset=all&within=1d&date=today". That helps some. Many of you probably already know about it,but just FYI!

has google explained their rationale for NOT providing the option? do they have a rationale? the putting forth of the workaround (going to IMAP on a desktop) seems like an acknowledgment of the issue. i'm just confused by lack of explanation and the simultaneous lack of interest in addressing it.

Sign the petition to make conversation grouping an option.

https://groups.google.com/group/Gmail...

Boy, some of you need to get a grip.

Why don't you just ask google for a refund? Oh yeah, gmail is FREE. Some of you act like you contracted a software developer who didn't deliver your personal specifications.

If you don't like the occasional threading of unrelated messages, or you're too dense to figure out what messages in a thread are unread, then sure, pay for yahoo and it's sluggish interface and crummy spam filters and slow search that almost makes Outlook's search seem fast by comparison. Maybe gmail is not for you. That's not necessarily gmail's fault or responsibility.

Google is a business. They may or may not be a lot of things, but they're certainly not stupid. If an unthreading option were easy to implement, surely it would have been done. It probably will be in the future. If a majority of users really didn't like it, it probably wouldn't exist.

I use gmail for one reason above all else. It's fast. The interface is fast, and the search is blazing fast. I used to have an elaborate system of Outlook folders, because lord knows you can't count on Outlook's search function. Even search add-ons like X1 didn't relieve the hassle of constantly manually indexing messages into folders. And as others have noted, Outlook, Yahoo etc don't let you associate a message with multiple folders.

Gmail solves more problems than it causes. How many of you spend half the day in meetings and come back to hundreds of unread messages? Isn't the threading feature useful in that case? Seeing the conversation at a glance makes life easier. What do you do on other email systems if you want to save all responses to a particular conversation? Drag all those responses into a folder? Gross.

If you really must break a particular message out of a thread, just forward the message to yourself, edit the subject, and cut the thread down to just what you need. I find myself needing to do this once or twice a week. I recover that time 100x over due to gmail's speed, excellent spam filters, and labels/archive feature.

It can't hurt to add your vote at https://groups.google.com/group/Gmail... as others have suggested. The idea that google doesn't listen to users is foolish. Google exists because they figured out the best way to give the most relevant information on demand.

I am surprised that the firefox developer community hasn't come up with an add-on to address this, but that in itself tells you that this is far from a trivial technical challenge.

While I like the feature, I'm not as radical: I would prefer to be able to rearrange the conversations my way.
Sometimes gmail splits conversations that I would prefer to be joined or joins messages that I rather handle seperated.

Quick comment to Yogi. You said "...They may or may not be a lot of things, but they're certainly not stupid. If an unthreading option were easy to implement, surely it would have been done...". This is not a difficult change to implement. Not threading is "normal" behavior for email servers and clients. And because Gmail's IMAP access is non-threaded, it tells me that conversation view is a client-side function. Changing the behavior in the client isn't rocket science, Google just has no desire to do this because they feel a need to make you do things their way.

Jay is right. Turning off threading is not difficult. Google just does not feel like doing it. And they feel that we have no choice but to use gmail only.

What a relief to find this thread. I am not mad - or at least not alone. I view my gmail account in Thunderbird - which was a workaround I employed when I first subscribed to Gmail and could not immediately see how to remove the "Conversation bug". But when I am not in the office I run the risk of missing vital emails etc and at last I have snapped and searched for the solution. I cannot believe that Google have not fixed this feature/bug and I guess I will now have to forward all my emails to Yahoo. Changing my email address is not really an option. But what a crazy world that Google should not have offered us a choice.

Yes, please add this "unthreading" feature into Gmail Labs....!

Come on Google... I see you're now changing how labels work...

This can't be THAT hard!