Ungrouping a Conversation in Mail

I hate grouped mails, more so when they are grouped in a meaningless way.

Although, thanks to this crazy grouping by Mac mail, I once jumped into an old and forgotten mail, which I wrote two years ago, and it proved very useful in another context.

So, thank you, Mac, for being so stupid :-)

I came on here with the same issue. I decided to uncheck the group by conversation in the View menu. I noticed then that Mail highlights the emails from same conversations in blue, which is definitely better than what it did before...grouping 81 completely unrelated messages together. So, it's better for me for now, although I would still definitely prefer grouped messages from the same conversation.

I've tried all the suggestions, but nothing happened. I even Rebuilt my mailbox, but now I have three different senders all under the same conversation, even though they have different subjects and email addresses.

Apple, please figure something out!!

I'm resisting the urge to say something sarcastic, but if you go back and actually read the whole thread, you will see that everyone is aware that we can simply turn this feature off. The point is that we WANT the feature to be on - we just want it to work correctly. The comments in this thread are all simply pointing out that people are still experiencing this bug, years after it was initially reported, and we are extremely frustrated with Apple for ignoring us and not fixing it.

I am a software developer with 34 years of experience writing software, and I'm saying that there is simply no excuse for Apple not being able to fix this issue in the many years that it's been reported by various users. It would be rather easy to fix as well. Give me a day, and access to the source code, and I'll do it myself. It makes me wonder how they spend so much time doing market research for new products (presumably at great expense), but they won't listen to customer complaint constituting FREE advice on what customer actually want from their products. (Do you hear this, Apple?!?)

Hypractiv, I almost agree with you. I've thought about it, and it isn't easy to define what you mean by grouping by conversation. People can join a conversation and leave a conversation. The issues being discussed can drift until it's really a different conversation with the same Subject header, until somebody decides to change the Subject header to conform to the topic, and then it looks like a different conversation. Even the Reply-to header can be unreliable.

That said, even though a perfect algorithm for grouping by conversation may be impossible, we can all agree that there's a better way than Apple is using now. But as they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Good points, of course. I suppose, if I'm honest, I'm comparing it to Google or Outlook. People have been using those for ages, and they work reasonably well, although I'm not a huge fans of the way Outlook does it.

If I were writing it, I wouldn't try to make it overly-intelligent. That's a recipe for failure, as we've seen. Group things with the same subject and with at least one of the original recipients. If someone changes the subject, all bets are off; but most people know that anyway, or would be able to figure it out through experience. That behaviour would certainly be more acceptable than the useless algorithm that currently exists. (It's grabbing messages that have literally nothing in common.) If it's searching the body of the message for common threads, then all bets are off. We simply don't have the A.I. to do that yet. :-)

For me, the common feature of the uselessly grouped emails seems to be an mail 'References' containing an empty entry. For example, Mail/View/Message/AllHeaders and see something like:

References: <E27BEF97BB67EB46B6D827165C888CB3623A1636@mboxes2.campus.vims.edu> <,<BABD1BF0F5F0E4468CD18153E6B81D84622369B9@mboxes2.campus.vims.edu> <>> <E27BEF97BB67EB46B6D827165C888CB3623A16F7@mboxes2.campus.vims.edu> <,<643C1D83-0623-420F-8EE3-A7BC1645E401@vims.edu>>

Maybe if the grouping tool was smart enough to ignore null refernces as a grouping key, this wouldn't be part of a 179 message 'conversation'.

YaserM's suggestion helped me.

But I also discover that I need to go into every of my folders for different emails and the sub-folders of each emails to "Ungroup". Is there a GLOBAL way to unclick all "Organize by Conversations" ?

You can still use the Organize by Conversations option just make sure to uncheck "Show Related Messages". This will remove some others you may want in there but you can alway click on View, then "Show Related Messages" to get them back for that message. Ugly workaround but you get conversations organized correctly and can add the related messages depending on which one you are looking at.

I believe this bug has been fixed. I just unchecked the "organize by conversation" feature and that seemed to do the trick. I too was having trouble with emails being grouped together that weren't necessarily the same part of the same email thread (they only had the same subject lines).

Though, I would encourage you all to check before taking my word for it.

I believe this bug has been fixed. I just unchecked the "organize by conversation" feature and that seemed to do the trick.

That simply turns the function off so nothing will be organized by conversation, but that's what we want Mail to do except it's not doing it correctly. As far as I can tell, the bug still exists. Turning off the function isn't a solution to the problem. Apple fixing the problem is the solution to the problem.

The "Organize by Conversation" option keeps coming back on my Mac. It happens with the same email person. I uncheck it, then a few days later it becomes checked again. I am very new to Apple, got my iPhone and Mac in the last 75 days. I shouldn't expect Apple to be perfect but it looks, from this thread, they are not listening to the user community. Sorry to hear that. I have more then 35 years in the IT business and am more than a little surprised Apple isn't monitoring these forums, pulling in suggestions, and prioritizing them. If they are, I think going the next step and letting the user community know when fixes might be available would be a good thing.

I don't understand why everybody keeps advizing to 'uncheck organize by conversation'. That is not the issue. (Why have a feature that you then disable because it doesn't work correctly???)

Personally I am quite happy with the organization by conversation - IN PRINCIPLE - if only the emails in a conversation really belong to that conversation. Often they do. Sometimes they don't. What I would like to do is take individual emails out of a conversation and tell the system it did something wrong. The mail program could even use these manual actions to teach itself to become better in its job. (Just like you can teach the system what's SPAM). Is there any way to take out individual messages out of a particular conversation and say to the mail system: no, this one should not be in here?

I wanted to post the following solution that seemed to have helped my issue with this grouping problem!

Instead of linking my Gmail account with Airmail using the Gmail setup, I used the IMAP setup instead. I still have "Use Conversations" preference enabled. For whatever reason, this seemed to fix the issue of non-related emails being grouped together simply because the Subject was the same (even though I had the "Group by Subject" preference unchecked.

Not sure if this will be helpful for anyone but thought I'd post how I was able to fix it!

I totally agree with you -- I too love this feature. BUT, when an error occurs where two unrelated emails are joined together in the same thread b/c of the same subject line text, one should be able to pull that particular email out and separate it from the conversation.