Ungrouping a Conversation in Mail

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.

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.

Same problem for me. I have two conversations, with two different subjects and recipients that have been grouped together with no apparent reason why.

Impossible to separate them.

Only solution is to split ALL conversations, which I hate.

Also the same problem for me in Apple Mail 8.1 under OS X Yosemite 10.10.1. A number of unrelated email messages to multiple contacts with entirely different subject lines are being grouped into single conversation threads.

Sometimes these messages are days apart and the thread will include new messages with distinct subject lines. Meaning, they don't all share an RE: or FW:, for instance, or any remotely similar wording. They will also be sent from different accounts, sometimes messages from my work account and other times my personal address mixed into the thread.

I haven't yet found any examples of people being included in replies that shouldn't be or of them receiving content in replies that would otherwise normally be in a separate thread.

I'm not sure what criteria Mail uses to group conversations into threads but something is off in Yosemite for sure. I haven't noticed this behaviour under Mavericks or earlier OSs.

This bug really needs to be addressed by Apple. I hope they're following this thread.

I am experiencing probably an extreme case of this.

Nothing seems to be the same. The only common feature is that the sender/recipient is me.

The subject lines are different, none of the other sender/recipients overlap, AND the languages are different.

For that matter, the writing systems are different. The other language doesn't use alphabet. No shared workplaces. It's very annoying.

Additionally, recently some Mac users claim they are not receiving my email. I am suspecting that my mails are getting lost in this type of situation on their Macs.

I agree with Hypraktiv. Three years and the problems gets worse before it gets better. Totally unacceptable.

This is a different Apple, no doubt of that. Quality has clearly come down

I decided to deactivate the grouping future

It is 2015 now and this issue still happens, I really think Apple Engineers are having this issue when they are using the Mac...and still nothing changed. I would really like if there is an option says "Organize by Subject" other than the "Organize by Conversation". Please help.