Mail 2.0: Should have a command to separate wrongly threaded messages

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
March 24th, 2006 • 2:29 pm

I wish that the algorithm that Mail 2.0 uses to determine which messages are part of the same thread were smarter but—well, it just ain’t.

My main job is professional translator. I receive most of my work via e-mail.

It’s hard to believe the number of clients who send me work in e-mails with the subject line “Translation.” I really do wish that they were more specific but—they just ain’t.

And of course, Mail is dumb enough to think that all these messages with the subject line “Translation” (or “Re: Translation” or “Translation” prefixed with any number of occurrences of “Re:”) are part of the same thread.

This means that I might have two messages in my Inbox, one dated March 1 from Sender A and one dated March 20 from Sender B, both with the subject line “Translation,” and Mail gleefully puts them together in the same thread (dated March 20), even though Sender A and Sender B don’t even know of each other’s existence.

This is utterly inconvenient. And I am quite sure that it is a problem that doesn’t just happen to professional translators.

Like I said, I wish that Mail 2.0’s algorithm were smarter. It could, for example, refrain from grouping in the same thread messages which only have one word in the subject line in common. As far as I know, Mail also uses unique e-mail message identifiers in the message headers to follow threads even when subject lines are changed. So it obviously can be smart in some cases. Why does it have to be so dumb in other cases?

Rather than wait until Apple’s engineers get the message and fix the algorithm, however, I think I’d rather have a command in Mail that lets you manually separate messages that Mail has erroneously grouped in the same thread—and conversely, it should let you group together in a thread messages that it has failed to group by itself, even though, for you, they are part of the same thread.

In other words, I think Mail should have a command that lets the user control what constitutes a thread. After all, it already has various commands to flag messages as junk or not junk, read or not read, etc. Why couldn’t it let the user flag messages as being part of the same thread—or not?

I like threads. I don’t want to turn the feature off altogether. But I want it to be more flexible and certainly allow me to correct it when it’s wrong.

This is a typical problem with a software product that thinks that it is smarter than the user. Apple should know better. We are talking about real-life conservations between real-life people here. They should be trusted to have a better sense of what constitutes a discussion thread or not than a simply software algorithm that knows very little about the real world.


One Response to “Mail 2.0: Should have a command to separate wrongly threaded messages”

  1. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Mail.app: Two gripes and a bouquet says:

    […] Pierre Igot at Betalogue is frustrated by the not-very-smart algorithm that controls the way Mail threads messages. It doesn’t have to as dumb as it is, he reckons: As far as I know, Mail also uses unique e-mail message identifiers in the message headers to follow threads even when subject lines are changed. So it obviously can be smart in some cases. Why does it have to be so dumb in other cases? […]

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