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Conversations not grouped by subject in El Capitan mail

I get emails from Fail2Ban on one of the web servers I manage. Each one has a subject of the form "[Fail2Ban] WordPress: banned 45.41.92.66". They're all the same except for the IP address ("45.41.92.66"). Before El Capitan, all the messages with identical subjects, in this case the same IP address, were grouped into a conversation, with a handy dandy counter plainly visible. That made it easy to see which IP addresses were attempting logins so often that I needed to ban them permanently, not just for 10 minutes at a time, as my Fail2Ban is configured to do.

El Capitan mail organizes messages by actual conversations, i.e. messages that are responses to an original, but it doesn't group emails with identical subjects that are not actually part of the same conversation. This is likely correct for many email conversations, but it doesn't work for these Fail2Ban messages. I would love to have a preference to select the old way of grouping by only the text in the subject.

Mail-OTHER, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 3:38 AM

74 replies

Oct 22, 2015 4:34 AM in response to Bill St. Clair

I too am experiencing this same issue. I assume that everybody is but am not sure. I was excited when I saw the available update yesterday but it appears that it did not include a fix for this issue. Hope they get it worked out soon.

piti4ek

Level 1

5 points

Oct 22, 2015 4:40 AM in response to dknelson99

Unfortunately yes, not fixed yet. Im so waiting for it

coffy.sk

Level 1

4 points

Oct 22, 2015 8:15 AM in response to piti4ek

this is 2nd annoying issue. I started to experience also problems with Safari loading web pages, but this is for another thread.

codebowl

Level 1

5 points

Oct 22, 2015 8:39 PM in response to Bill St. Clair

This almost makes me want to downgrade, after upgrading today I noticed the grouping of messages was gone, this is not good when you're dealing with emails that cronjobs send on different intervals. I hope they bring the grouping back but with a closed ticket and no way to communicate with them I find it hard to believe they will.

Oct 23, 2015 3:15 AM in response to codebowl

Well, you may be right but I would think that if they intentionally removed it, they would have removed the "organize by conversation" option in the View menu. Because the option is still there, I am hopeful that it is just a bug that will be taken care of soon.

ruddog

Level 1

9 points

Oct 23, 2015 5:42 AM in response to Bill St. Clair

The removal of this feature has inspired me to prepend the subjects of as many automated emails as I can with "RE: ". This enables threading across platforms: Windows or Mac, Outlook or Mail.

One issue I ran into doing this, is if the subject is exactly the same, it will put them all in a single thread, instead of separate them by sender like Mail used to. Most notably, HP server SNMP traps. To fix that, I added the hostname of the server to the subject of those too. Now everyone on my team has their automated emails threaded, regardless of OS or application. For the stuff I can't change the email subject for, like hardware appliances, I'm debating having the mail server rewrite the subject before its delivered.

Oct 23, 2015 2:42 PM in response to ruddog

I pretty much understand what you are saying but it is not a solution to the emails that I get. I hope that they get this corrected soon.

wondras

Level 1

0 points

Oct 25, 2015 10:08 AM in response to dknelson99

> Because the option is still there, I am hopeful that it is just a bug that will be taken care of soon.

The option still "works", since messages with "re:" in the subject are grouped into conversations. They just decided that messages from the same sender with the exact same subject line are no longer "conversations".

I installed the 10.11.1 update that was just released. I don't see any change to the behavior for conversations. 😟

Oct 26, 2015 7:48 PM in response to RedForeman

I agree. Why would Apple remove a really great feature? Why not, at least, keep it as an option?

scuben

Level 1

0 points

Oct 26, 2015 7:48 PM in response to mikeyfreedom

Besten Dank für Ihre Nachricht.

Ich bin bis und mit 27.10.2015 nicht im Büro.

Bitte wenden Sie sich in dringenden Fällen an Herr Patrick Gsell. Sie erreichen ihn per E-Mail unter patrick.gsell@artack.ch oder telefonisch unter 044 222 22 11.

Ihre E-Mail wird nicht automatisch weiter geleitet.

Beste Grüsse

Patrick Landolt

Oct 29, 2015 6:58 PM in response to ruddog

Yeah, I could go do that, for the hundred's of notifications that I have setup, but why?

In what idiot's infinite wisdom would they decide to remove a feature that was working?

Not to mention, the same thing is happening on iOS now with 9.1

Is there some way to configure it in some magic config file at terminal?

HeII, I am ready to find the previous version of Mail and drop it over this version...but not sure that will work.

Oct 31, 2015 2:58 PM in response to Bill St. Clair

The ONE feature that made the OSX Mail client really useful and unique and they take it away! Does anyone know of any other email client with this feature?

Nov 1, 2015 6:56 PM in response to fedepenadlp

Honestly, this is the most compelling reason here, and I never looked it that way.

OSX Mail provided the SINGLE way to do this across ALL MAIL CLIENTS.

It had been doing it for quite a few versions that I know....

...and of course Apple removes it, and if you look at this thread, folks knew during the beta.

Yet again, apple gave zero shlts about it.

I can't believe the iPhone crew is not expoloding about it, since 9.1 is doing the same there.....

Total fail on Apple's part.

Sonyque

Level 1

0 points

Nov 11, 2015 4:57 AM in response to TimtheRockstar

Have the same problem. This almost makes me want to downgrade, hope it will be fixed in the future.

Nov 12, 2015 7:19 PM in response to Sonyque

I too would downgrade if possible. There is nothing in the new version that makes up for this the way I use my computer. I haven't seen anywhere that Apple even remarks as to whether this is a bug or a feature that they just changed.

I saw where somebody asked if there was another email client that offers this feature but never saw and answer. Does anybody know?

Conversations not grouped by subject in El Capitan mail