Gmail Solved the "Impossible" Problem (opens in new tab)

(elizlaraki.substack.com)

22 pointsDreaminDani1y ago10 comments

10 comments

I love seeing that old Gmail look. It's so much more usable.

Gmail and Chrome are on the brink of being unusable and it seems the same problems they solved of readability are noe being reintroduced.

davidt841y ago

Uh, threaded email existed long before Gmail, see mutt.

forgotpwd161y ago

Article seems to talk about the "flat chat-like" view (called conversation threading) rather threading in general. Threading as seen in mutt theoretically exists since email was standardized in RFC 822 (predating even Usenet) due to Message-ID/In-Reply-To/References fields in header (which mutt uses).

leephillips1y ago

Yes, the article seems to be confused in a few ways. The fact is that Gmail is not a real email user agent, because of a handful of deficiencies; the most critical of these is the lack of conversation threading. This article (https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/) shows in detail how Gmail is broken and how a non-broken email client (mutt in this case) does things more usefully.

saurik1y ago

The context behind this article is that a lot of people (not me) find the innovative thing about Gmail is precisely that it doesn't render email threads as messages built into trees, but instead clusters them into these flat groups (which FWIW I think most people do associate with the term "thread", as you are browsing by thread, not by message). The article then goes through how they came to this new model, rather than merely implementing the thing which every other client does. And like, while you and I dislike this way of using email, it really now is so popular that everyone else feels like they have to copy it as it really is that popular.

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