Mail: Organize By Conversation - wrong emails

I could not agree more -- love the VHS analogy. I would drop Mac Mail in a heartbeat over this if any other mail app offered the combination of easy integration with my calendar and message tagging viewable across multiple computers. I haven't found one yet though the email conversation mess is not a problem on Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mail Pilot.

I just tried Mail Mate. Reverted to Mail immediately. Mail Pilot looks nice. I don't really need the calendar thing, but message tagging, what is that?

Tagging allows you to attach a tag to a message and then sort or search by tag, kind of like the flags in Mail. MailTags is a really nice add-on app for doing this in Mail and the tags stay consistent across machines. Thunderbird does this fairly well too but it's a total pain to sync the tags across machines.

I am also having this problem. but it is very bad here because it is linking together messages from people is should not be. Messages of a personal nature are being linked to business messages. This has potential for very bad results. I have tried all of the things suggested here. none of them work except for turning off "organize by conversation in the view menu. I dont like it this way, but it is better than the alternative.

honestly, I have reached the point of wondering why they even change things any more. is Yosemite really better than mavericks was? or is it just change for the sake of change. Messing-up what worked well, merely for the sake of change is not my idea of good business practices.

I think you can all save your anxiety for Apple. The point is that there is no way to select a mishandled conversation thread and unbundle it. The bad design is that, even if the automatic bundling can not, in principle, be perfect, there should at least be a way to exclude mishandled conversations from being bundled.

This is NOT software design ROCKET science. Apple has been continually ignoring their community of Mac OS X users' complaints for more than two years. Unacceptable, full stop.

Randy

I too am having this issue. Just found this discussion and at least feel validated in knowing that I'm not the only one. Surprising that Apple has not released a patch for this yet after this many months. I guess I too will have to start looking for an alternative to Mail. I really like Mail and have always used that as my email client, but this is really getting frustrating on a daily basis.

Same problem here as well on 10.10.2. Subject lines of individual messages are completely different, with completely different recipients too, yet Mail still groups them together as a single thread. I'd LOVE to see the horrible programming logic behind this bug.

That solved the issue for me. Thanks.

If it's at all helpful, none of the above worked for me; but I only find problems when I have my POP account enabled along with all my IMAP accounts.

Could this be related?

I have the same problem. It's been going on for a while. I think it may be IMAP related, but I have no way to test that. All of my nine mail accounts are IMAP.

Hi Bruce,

Don't think it's an IMAP thing—at least not directly. I have no IMAP accounts, only 3 POP accounts.

Antony. Good to know that. I looked at my Macbook Pro and I see it too has the same problem with the same (only one) conversation. Maybe it's something with my host.

Yeah, me too! Don't know if it helps, but the issue started with me after I sent a group email to recipients in my exchange account.

Now, I have a conversation with hundreds of emails (ALL DIFFERENT SUBJECTS!!). However, they are all related to the contacts from the initial group email i sent. Mail now thinks they are all related. There must be a meta file containing AI links created by Mail we can delete. It's not in the cache. Tried that one.

People have had success creating new users, so there is a preference file somewhere. Anyone have any ideas?

Now I have another wrongly threaded group of emails. I took a look at my webmail. It's threaded correctly there. This has to be a flaw in Apple Mail. I wish there was a way to fix this.

Okay, I’ve fixed the problem but it was a bit of a pain in the ring.

There seems to be an issue with the ‘Envelope’ files inside V2 in the Mail folder.

After reading the contents of this file, there seems to be associative records kept by mail to make decisions on linking threads. However, simply removing these files, or replacing them with backups would not fix the problem for me. There must be system backups or linked files stored elsewhere. Actually, replacing these files made my situation much worse. Instead of a thread with 200 emails I had one with over 500!!

So, here is what i did to fix the issue. (using it for a few weeks now without any threading problems)

First, deleted all ‘Group emails’ from my sent box. I found that most of my issues with wrong threading related to addresses I had used in group emails. ie, sending an email with the same subject to several recipients in my contacts from multiple companies.

Then reset mail to factory settings as detailed below. Job Done!

Takes a few hours to download all of the emails from imap or exchange servers, but after that, everything is back to normal.

Before doing any of the following BACKUP your mail!!!!! Either using TimeMachine or manually, as this will reset your Mail to Factory Settings!!!!

Quit Mail, then in the Finder menu press ‘Go’ then type ‘~/Library’

This will take you to your Library folder inside your User folder.

Move the following items from the folder that opens to the Trash (some may not exist).

- Caches/com.apple.mail

- Saved Application State/com.apple.mail.savedState

- Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr

- Containers/com.apple.mail

- Mail (you are not moving the Mail application but the folder inside ~/Libarary)

- Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

- Preferences/com.apple.mail.searchhistory.plist

Once you’ve done this, restart your Mac and open up your System Preferences. You will then need to enable your mail accounts again (inside Internet Accounts). You may need to re-enter some mail passwords and/or Apple ID depending on the mail accounts you are using.

Imap or Exchange accounts should re-populate inboxes automatically, but you may have to re-import other accounts/folders from backups.