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Ungrouping a Conversation in Mail

I have conversations turned on in Mail. However, it is auto-grouping messages that don't go together. (In this case, the messages have the same subject, the generic word "Question." Besides both being in my Mail, the two messages don't have anything to do with one another.)


Does anyone know of a way to ungroup these messages so they go into different conversations? If not, there needs to be some way to tell Mail to group or ungroup messages that it doesn't guess correctly on.

Posted on Jul 27, 2011 9:46 PM

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Posted on Jul 30, 2011 9:25 PM

Okay I literally made an account just to post an answer to this because it was killing me but I finally figured it out and I had to tell you.


Just go to "View" on the top and uncheck the "Organize by Conversation" option. You should also do "Sort by Date" in the View toolbar as well. That should handle it. You could also do this by each individual folder of mailbox so it's really customizable and great!


Hope this helps 🙂

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 30, 2011 9:25 PM in response to Chris San Antone

Okay I literally made an account just to post an answer to this because it was killing me but I finally figured it out and I had to tell you.


Just go to "View" on the top and uncheck the "Organize by Conversation" option. You should also do "Sort by Date" in the View toolbar as well. That should handle it. You could also do this by each individual folder of mailbox so it's really customizable and great!


Hope this helps 🙂

Jul 31, 2011 9:31 AM in response to Chris San Antone

I agree with you. As far as I can tell Apple Mail cannot determine which messages go in which conversations. This seems like a high priority bug.


Can anyone figure out why Apple Mail groups messages that are not in the same conversation? Is there a way you could build a plug-in so that it would look for some sort of conversation ID or something?

Oct 25, 2011 7:52 AM in response to Chris San Antone

I finally updraged to Lion (now that some of my most important applications are at last compatible). Is this issue resolved?


I am having the same issure, where Lion is grouping messages that are completely unrelated simply because they have the same subject (e.g. "here" or "look into this"). I'm not one for complicated subject lines, especially if it's just a note for myself.


This is a big issue for me! I had one email to my roommate about an upcoming party grouped with another email to my boss. What if I would have replied to all and it invited my boss to my kegger? How many double agents are now dead because Lion incorrectly replyed to all and blew their cover?? Okay, that was reaching... but still.


Is there any way to ungroup a thread, or train Apple Mail to tell the difference? I'm not sure if threading includes quoting in a reply, but it's still an issue in terms of trying to find and organize the right emails.


Please let me know if there is anything I can do!

Feb 6, 2012 7:37 PM in response to Chris San Antone

I've been having this same problem since upgrading (errr. down-grading if you ask me) to Lion.


My team works on multiple projects at the same time, and I've trained them to be specific with the email Subject line in order to keep them straight. However, Mail will lump messages with the subject line "ASU Morph" with messages "OFT-900" just because they are from the same sender. I'm assuming that's why they're put into the same conversation.


These are completely different projects, concerning different matters, and need to be filed under their own project folders within Mail. Coudn't the conversation grouping just be based on the Subject line and ignore the Re:, Fwd: etc.?


I don't need Apple to try and guess my intentions inside the body of the message. Simply determine conversations based on the Subject line and be done with it.

Feb 9, 2012 3:51 AM in response to TBoxman-Me

I have the same exact problem. I wonder how nobody else noticed it...


I guess that most people either do not receive e-mails, do not use Apple Mail or just use it the way they did 5 years ago.


Since I use an Exchange Server for my work e-mail account, what I did was to use Outlook 2011 and it does conversations wonderfully.


Way, way better than Mail - I have one thread in Apple Mail with more than 100 e-mails, for more than 5 years for totally completely different matters... I don't get why they are all grouped together - On outlook, that thread does not even exist...

Sep 26, 2012 4:28 AM in response to Chris San Antone

And we are now into Mountain Lion and I hate that it nests or groups which might be the better word, email from the same person on the same topic. I find that I am missing new email responses,or just can't find the ones that I really want, isn't there way to just undo this and go back to the good old school way of either manually flagging or colour coding the messages you want to link for easy searching? I hate this new feature.

Jun 16, 2013 10:13 AM in response to sytrader

That's not a solution to this problem.


While it might be a relief from these annoying errors, that's an "all or nothing" approach that turns off grouping altogether for every email. The issue is that we WANT to have grouped conversations, but we want them to be grouped correctly, instead of being randomly and mistakingly grouped just because they share similar subject lines.


I wish Apple could either solve this problem with improved algorithms for grouping, or by being able to manually group/ungroup specific individual emails.

Aug 7, 2013 6:01 PM in response to J Mat

Grouping into conversations is a good thing but it needs two enhancements (that I can think of):


1. The rules are secret. They should be transparent and they should be user-modifiable. Preferably there should be not only ways to write general rules but also ways to write rules for a specific sender or subject.


2. The rules will never produce perfect grouping. There should be a way to drag and drop messages and groups into or out of other groups.

Ungrouping a Conversation in Mail

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