Google Support Confirms Gmail Threading Bug

UPDATE: This post was blogged on Upian's Hot Links and on Jeremy Zawodny's Linkblog.

I am going to test out my theory that "personal journalists" are having an impact by doing some reporting of my own and watching if this spreads online.

As some of you know, I have a Google Gmail account. Now don't get me wrong. I love Google. I live on it. And I am thrilled they are launching an email service. It's speedy, it has massive storage, I like the contextual ads and I like the conversation threading features ... if they get them fixed.

I am using my blog to report that Gmail, in beta, has a conversation threading bug that Google has confirmed to me via email. They say they are working on it. I am sure they are. I am posting this not to bash them, but to monitor if or how this spreads.

Basically, when I send out multiple emails to multiple recipients that share the exact same subject header, they all get grouped together. I got confused today by the bug...I couldn't follow who I was sending email to.

Here's the thread from their support team, confirming the bug. Let's see who picks this up. If you blog me, please trackback this so the group can see the results. Thanks.

Gmail Team (gmail-support@google.com) Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 3:18PM

To: steverubel (at) gmail . com

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your report. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to fix this at this time. We are, however, aware of the problem and the engineering team is working on a fix.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Please keep in mind this is a preview release of Gmail, and we appreciate your patience during our limited test period.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Original Message Follows:

------------------------

From: steverubel (at) gmail . com

Subject: I send multiple emails with the same subject to multiple recipients. Even though each is a separate thread they all get threaded together. Please advise how to remedy.

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 19:06:00 -0000

Hi. When I send out separate emails to recipients using the same subject line and I get replies, they get threaded together when really they are separate conversations. How can I fix this? Thanks.

GmailAddress: steverubel (at) gmail . com

QuestionTopic: conv_threading

Name: Steve Rubel

OS: winxp

Browser: Internet Explorer 6.x

Comments

[Jonathan Greene]

First - a bit jealous you've got GMail... still waiting for mine to give it a good looksee...

Second - in Mail clients I've used that support threading (or discussions in Google parlance) that's the way it works. You can even change the subject line and they will detect that in fact it is a reply and group things together. My current mail client, Mail in OS X does this and in many ways it's nice to be efficient, but also confusing when the replies start to deviate from the initial topic.

[Steve Rubel]

Yes, except these are really different conversations - big difference. I have used Panther mail. This is different.

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

Depends on what software your recipients where using. MUAs generally use In-Reply-To: and References: headers where available to nest threads, but not all clients generate those (none of Microsoft's do). In that case, threading by subject is the only choice, and for the mailer, unless it scans the body and tries to use very fragile heuristics, the only indication of which mail is a reply to which other mail is the date.

[Anonymous]

Outlook does use In-Reply-To: headers, using the Message-Id of the replied-to message.

It is recommended in one of the SMTP rfcs, and it is much more reliable than subjects.

As the initial poster notes, if you send different emails with the same subject, subject-based threading can easily mess up.

[Joyce Krouse]

Can anyone help me. PLEASE

I cannot retreive my email from Gmail....asks for sign in and password.They say they do not know me...What can I do---please helpjoycekrouse@verizon.netAll I get is automated messages---no use to me..... Joyce