Ungrouping a Conversation in Mail

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.

Sup everyone, any progress on this topic since upgrading to Mavericks ?

As for me, this.....lets call it "bug" not only merges completely different messages in one converstaion. But is also sometimes doesnt merge replies on my messages just because of the added "Re: " in headline

In the mail view option just uncheck the organize by conversation.

cheers 😁

The option to group or ungroup via Organise by conversation is simply not available. This is driving me nuts and wasting such a lot of time. Any more suggestions pls?

elaines1

I had the same problem as elaines1 which is how I got here... my boss happen into my office and suggested adding the "conversations" button to the toolbar, after that I could toggle on and off conversations using that button. The checkbox under view still doesn't appear but it does allow me to turn off conversations mode which is what I wanted to do.

I have no idea how to fix faulty conversation grouping though.

Hi Everyone,

Review this carefully and you will likely solve the problem. I was very frustrated and removed the "organize by conversation" under viewing in prefs and nothing changed.

After you disable the "organize by conversation" in the mail/pref/view tab. Go back to you inbox and on the top menu (file, edit, etc...) go to "view" and uncheck org. by conversation. It is slightly anoying they have this setting in two places. Hope this helps.

As others in this thread have said, this does not solve the problem. We want to group messages that are in the same message string (includes all replies, etc.). Without this, we would have to search through lots of emails just to read a conversation. The problem is that Apple Mail groups all messages with the same subject line alone. For example, all emails with a subject line of "Status Update," would all be grouped together regardless of the senders and receivers. This makes no sense and should be fixed. Apple execs and engineers, do you hear us?

"We want to group messages that are in the same message string (includes all replies, etc.)."

Yes, but how? The text of a reply doesn't always identify the message being replied to. The header (sometimes?) includes an "In-Reply-To" that may give the "Message-Id" of the message being replied to, or it may have a value with another format that refers to a message that the recipient neither sent nor received.

Suppose the "In-Reply-To" value is always present and can be relied on. The mail app could search all stored messages to identify each group, but that seems impractical. If there were a Message-Id index of all stored email messages it would be easy to identify all messages in a conversation. Does such an index exist? If not, how hard would it be to create one?

But if some replies do not have an "In-Reply-To" in the message header, then there would seem to be no reliable way to group messages by real conversation.

I just wanted to point out that this issue is still occurring under Yosemite and has not been resolved yet. It is annoying as **** and regularly freaked me out every time I saw people/conversations that def SHOULD NOT be grouped together.

This is a major issue that should have been resolved a long time ago. The feature in general is pretty neat, but there is a high risk of embarrassment (boss, friends, love affairs...lol) here. Please do something about it!

I'm seeing a more serious manifestation of this problem (OS X 10.10).

I manage two mailing list (one via Yahoo! groups and one via mailman) and some messages are intentionally posted to both lists.

The mail app often shows just one of the messages.

I'm assuming it's because the originals had the same message ID, though the routing, subject and message bodies are quite different.

Switching conversations off sometimes shows the alternate message but not both.

The mail app on iOS 8 correctly shows both messages!

This bug is driving me crazy as well. It seems that in 10.10 this bug became even worse. I love the conversation sort function but now I have a grouped message from different emails (inboxes)! Hopefully we see a fix soon.

+1
Personally first encountered this problem just now under Yosemite 10.10.1

Not a small thing. Conversation with my pharmacy got mixed up with a private negotiation concerning marketing.

I've had this problem before, but now with Yosemite is worst.

Had a thread of over 100 messages grouped in complete non sense... not even a single word repeated in the subject line.

I did one little thing that helped, but it didn't fix completely.

I "rebuilt" my mailbox a couple of times. (Mailbox -> Rebuild)

Now the crazy thread is only 39 messages long.

As I said, problem still not 100% fixed.

With 10.10 Apple has turned a slightly broken feature into a massive bug.

Fair enough if grouping is based on subject and things get messed up on trivial subject lines, but I just had several conversations grouped that shared absolutely nothing (except my e-mail, which is true for all my mails, obviously).

These mails has no other recipients in common, no shared subject, not even partially - they're are in fact in different languages. It appears to be completely random now.

Apple: Judging from this thread the Mail app team has been working on this for 3 years now and only managed to make things worse - maybe it's time to throw in the towel and hand the project over to someone slightly more capable?

I see the same thing, with completely unrelated emails grouped together in a "conversation." They don't share the same sender, subject, or recipient (as I have multiple email addresses forwarding to the same inbox). Ok, the latter is a gray area, because they are ultimately arriving in the same email address, but the recipient email is different in all cases. I can't fathom how someone would arrive at an algorithm that behaves this way, and I write software for a living.

@BoaNeo, I'd dispute your assertion that the Mail team has been working on this for 3 years. To me, it looks like they've spent 3 years ignoring these posts, and finally decided to spend 2 hours "fixing" the problem, with no testing, and then lobbed it over the wall to angry customers. This goes totally against the grain of good software development practices.