Why did we move away from the logical threading to the new gmail-and-everyone-else style? The problem with emails is that you can reply to any email in a ’thread’. Seriously? You can even reply twice to the same email and create a new branch of replies. The new ‘conversation’ style of gmail and others just doesn’t take this into account.

Admittedly, it works OK when everyone is using the conversation style, and only ever replies to the very latest email. We do not live in a perfect world though, and I’ve seen too many instances of confusion caused by exactly this. The problem is only exacerbated if you are on mailing lists. Let’s look at a recent example of a mailing list thread, shown in the logical threading of thunderbird:

![Long conversation with lots of branches](/img/Screenshot from 2019-09-05 14-54-47.png)

Could you imagine trying to follow the conversation in a ‘conversation’ view? I count at least 10 distinct ‘conversations’ happening within this screenshot which conversation views have no way of discerning between, other than expanding the message and looking at the quoted reply to see which email it was in response to. Granted this is an extreme example but even in every day business Use I’ve found this threading to be very useful.

Why is thunderbird the only one to use this threading model (as far as I can tell at least)? I don’t know. What I really want to find is two alternatives, one for webmail and one for phone and I’ll be sorted. Though, unfortunately, they don’t seem to exist.