me's dashboard

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?

I know zimbra does, but most companies set zimbra up internally. Not sure if there are any public emails that use it – Todd Jones, on September 03, 2008 19:07

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.

zenbe looks really nice, thanks for the tip. but after i've used imap, pop seems so outdated to me. – Todd Jones, on September 03, 2008 03:17

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.