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Ask HN: Idea for improving email threading

1 points by achanlon ↗ HN
I believe we can all agree that grouping email by thread (à la Gmail, apple mail, etc.) is a great usability improvement; however, I find that all too often a single thread becomes very long, and (due to human laziness) the topic of discussion veers greatly from the subject line. I believe all threaded email readers should implement a command that 'breaks' a thread at any desired point within the thread, so that the emails prior to your 'break' command fall back into their original timeline order and your current topic of discussion can be separated from its full history. Thoughts?

1 comment

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] thread
dmils4
I think the best way to solve this is to have a toggle that removes all the archived messages. That's actually one piece of Facebook system that is awesome - there's no history at the bottom of every message that just gets longer and longer, because every message is a part of the history.

Gmail has an alright workaround - they manage to hide the content they view is copied from a previous message.

I don't know if explicitly breaking the thread would do anything - usually when a thread gets too long, I just change the subject line, problem solved.