Q: Conversations not grouped by subject in El Capitan mail

mecarpen wrote:

 

For those of you who can control the Subject of the incoming Emails to OS X Mail, prefix them with "Re: ".  For example, "Lake House Camera" becomes "Re: Lake House Camera".  When I made this change, my security camera Emails are organized just as they were before the upgrade.

Thanks for the tip but how can I "prefix" messages I already received ? With a rule ? AppleScript ?

I can't see any option in Mail to do that  …

I also switched to outlook since the upgrade.. outlook still provides this feature :-)

I looked in the app store and didn't see Outlook.  I'll take a look at the Microsoft page and see if I find it there.

How do you get this to work in Outlook? Outlook groups conversations for me, but not independent emails form the same sender with the same subject. I've found the latest Mail still groups more emails than Outlook does, but far less than it used to.

I can not understand, why apple do this? take away a very useful option. I get thousands of server emails from servers every day. in maverick all the same subjects mails was grouped in a few mails ... now I lost complete the overview and it is horrible. my apple mail is not usable anymore – i can not see the urgent mail because ot all the mails in the account. things going lost. why apple don't give me the option to handle ist like before? and why there isn't any reaction from apple ? it seems apple is the new microsoft :-(( I'm an apple user since 30 years and it is a shame. same way apple works on other topics.. changing professional software to standard consumer apps, no reactions to people working with apple to let them grow ... it seems apple want to make desktop solutions like iPhone apps ... no interesting anymore on people live with apple at work ... maybe the profit on desktop applications is to small. they don't need the old apple junkets anymore. in the years I did buy more than 100 macs I think but for know there is no way to speak with apple anymore. they don't need clients like me anymore ...

If Apple is the new Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is the new Apple...

I am as upset as anyone else in this discussion. My unread emails were piling up because I refused to process my email with the inferior Mail app that shipped with El Capital. I tried several mail clients for the Mac and couldn't find any good alternative. Someone mentioned Outlook, but I was not going to buy Office just so that I can process my email in a sensible manner. Then I remember from way back in my Windows days that there was something called Outlook Express. It doesn't exist any more, but I discovered that the Windows 10 Mail app does what we want/need. So I installed Windows 10 on my Mac using the VirtualBox and started processing my emails there! It is incredible, when you think about it, that Apple basically forced me down that path. I've hear good things about Windows 10 and was slightly curious, but would have never made the effort to set it up, had apple not let us all down.

Note: After installing it, I signed up to be a Windows Insider, which is suppose to allow me to use the pre-release versions. But I still don't understand if having a Windows 7 or 8 license is required to be an insider and thus avoid having to activate the Windows copy. If Microsoft wants to attract tech people considering jumping ship, that would be a bad policy.

Since this is not fixed (and my reminders CANT be dismissed or completed) I am going to set a DAILY reminder for me to:

• Post here to continue to drive this issue on the discussions higher
• Report this issue as mentioned before to http://www.apple.com/feedback/
• (I am not) But suggest if you are a developer, then report issue to: https://bugreport.apple.com/
• (I do not) But if you have support, suggest report the issue here: https://getsupport.apple.com/Issues.action

As mentioned before (thanks to who posted) there is no way to drive this as a primary issue since apple seems to be blind and stupid on this issue.

One would think their own internal groups would have screamed about this for any notification. Groups of people it still works, because people reply. But for headless or notification email it is totally useless.

So I call for everyone on this thread to do the same, light this up like a wildfire in a oil field....maybe we can get them to return this simple yet useful functionality....one of which NO OTHER SOFTWARE PROVIDES.

I have posted a feedback and will try to keep this thread active until it is fixed

Has anybody actually received any feedback from Apple?  I'm wondering now if they even consider this a bug.

Apple has informed that they never answer individually, but they do read the feedback. That I have observed since things I have reported as wrong has been corrected in the next update of the system or the app in question. Not necessarily because I complain, but possible because we were many having the same grudge about something.

So please do send the feedback to http://www.apple.com/feedback, and hopefully it will be corrected in 10.11.2 or at least in 10.11.3 :-)

I'm still concerned that they may not even consider it a bug but I submitted the feedback just now.  We'll see.

Does not matter if it is a bug or not. If we are many enough showing concern for a previous function now missing, I'll be surprised if Apple ignore us.

Dear All - it's not a bug it's a feature, in fact, it's a FIX as far as I'm concerned. Why?

I've been an increasingly heavy email user since the mid-1990s, and having set up and supported many clients with varied email needs. "Conversation mode" has been a nightmare - a blunt tool attempting to compensate for user inability to understand or use 'threading' which email clients has supported since the earliest days, grouping and nesting messages which are genuinely replies to an original message. Unfortunately, people increasingly started to "reply" irrelevantly to messages rather than starting new threads, or failing to reply and breaking up conversations - mostly, to be fair, through poor or non-existent training/explanation of why these things are important.

"Conversation mode" can be seen as an act of desperation, attempting to get email clients to 'reconstruct' some kind of organisation in the worsening blizzard of email. However, 'false positives' are common, especially the grouping by subject which pulls together emails which have nothing to do with each other, and frequently results in important new messages being missed, as they end up 'hidden' inside conversations they have nothing to do with, thanks to subject lines like "Invoice" or "Re: your message". Clients of mine have had to repair business relationships, and quite possibly lost large amounts of business this way.

Of course, I too have gotten used to this 'hack' though and, like others in this thread, will have to find another way to gather together (for example) bounces from my mailing lists and daily security software warning messages which otherwise overwhelm the individual personal messages in my InBoxes. Nonetheless, I am relieved to see a more robust approach - these other methods (particularly filtering into additional folders) have always existed - and I'm looking forward to fewer lost/missed messages (mine and my clients') and therefore fewer desperate/frustrated support calls.

So I repeat - it's not a bug, it's a fix and, while frustrating while we all get used to it, hopefully a reversal out of an unfortunate cul-de-sac in mail client design. Long may "conversation mode" behave more like good old-fashioned threading. Bless all the many people who educate, formally and informally, so that, instead of trying to make software 'idiot-proof' (idiots are too ingenious), we all accept that using any tool benefits from a little learning. So thank you to the thousands of people over the years who have posted instructions on how to use threading and filtering effectively... and indeed on the importance of good 'Subject' lines and correct use of the 'Reply' feature... er, in each case, it's in the name!

wwwolf wrote:

 

Dear All - it's not a bug it's a feature, in fact, it's a FIX as far as I'm concerned. Why?

Thanks for your insight, and attempting to wow us with your numerous years using email. I was a *heavy* email user, using PINE.

The advent of an application that would actually sort, search, and categorize email so it was useful was a revolution.

Even with Eudora, there were issues that lacked, one being this.

For your fix, simply turn off "Discussions" "Threads" or "Grouping".

But this is NOT THE ISSUE AT HAND HERE.

The issue is for the majority of the rest of the planet, who use grouping/threading/conversations, is that Mail as of v9.1 changed the method, and does not group as it did. And that is the complaint. Not the fact that grouping exists.

It is also true that NO OTHER MAIL CLIENT would group in the way that Mail 9.0x would, thus making it much more functional for more users than it was not functional for. This changed in 9.1.

If you don't like it, then turn it off you have that option.

For us that are not beating, we are trying to reinstate functionality that was lost and was used by far more people that exist in your camp.

So sell that nonsense on some other pointless thread where people care, because we do not.

Fact remains that

• There was a functionality that was implemented and useful, which has been removed
• If your issue is not with the loss of this functionality, then move on to another thread and bomb it. Infact, lets turn off thread's for forums, so ever post exists isolated on its own.

Regards,

<Edited by Host>

Just sent this as feedback:

"Previously to Mail 9.1, conversations that included the same subject were grouped. With the upgrade of 9.1, only conversations with "RE:" in the subject are grouped.

The previous functionality provided for grouping that NO OTHER EMAIL APPLICATION ON THE PLANET OFFERED.

This was a major benefit to Mail.

This is especially true with common emails like IoT Alerts, Notifications, and the likes.

Please re-instate the function as it was prior to Mail 9.1, or at least provide some function to configure this grouping, with option to group "all like subjects" or "only subject with specific replies", or even better "only subject with specific replies, only include addresses on original."

Read more at

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7252086?start=45&tstart=0

Regards,"