Monday, June 18th, 2007...12:58 pm

Conversation Threads in Evolution

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I really enjoy the way Google’s Gmail displays related messages (or threads) as conversations. David Morrison has been working on a plugin for Evolution which tries to replicate this behavior. The last news items was on August of 2005 asking if he was done.

I think it still needs a little bit more work, so I’ve written up a specification for Gmail’s conversation feature.

gmail thread reading thumbnail

Of course, once you do all that, it always turns out that someone else has written something similar already and for the same reason.

7 Comments

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7 Comments

  • Enver ALTIN
    June 18th, 2007 at 3:17 pm

    Particularly I like the thing that Gmail also adds sent messages to any threads it may have. I tried to replicate this using vfolders, details on my blog.

    Thanks,

  • Luis Matos
    June 18th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    and bongo project fork from novell’s hula, uses this by default … it is great. Also, thunderbird supports this also.

  • xkahn
    June 18th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    Luis: I followed Hula development with interest for some time, and I remember that conversation threads were of interest to the developers. I never got to see it working, so I’m pleased to hear it is working well.

    As for Thunderbird, I was not able to figure out what you’re talking about. I ran Thunderbird, and created my account. Then I opened my INBOX and selected View -> Sort By -> Threaded. The messages appeared nested in threads, but not in conversation threads.

    Maybe it’s a extension I need?

  • xkahn
    June 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    Enver: Yup. I have my Search Folders set up in a similar way. It’s very VERY helpful.

  • Christian Kellner
    June 18th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Hey,
    I have done some more work on the conversation view in the gicmo_rework branch some time ago. Getting the messages as a conversation is not that big of a problem but displaying it right as a plugin is not that easy. The code written during SoC by the student also was not that excellent. I guess if we wanna do that right, we would have to directly integrate it into Evo not as a plugin.

    Cheers,
    Christian

  • Justin Mason
    June 19th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    Hey — followed the referrer link from taint.org. I think your writeup is a more useful, concrete specification; mine was just a wishlist. ;) Thanks for writing it. It’d be great to see more MUAs offering this “conversation view” — I still greatly prefer it as an email UI.

  • Idetrorce
    December 16th, 2007 at 12:58 am

    very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
    Idetrorce

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