While many people (myself included) love the threaded “conversation view” that’s been a feature of Gmail since its launch, some don’t, particularly those moving from other email clients who can find it hard to adjust to it. The good news for those folks is that Google is adding the ability to turn off conversation view in Gmail for Google Apps users. Once conversation view is disabled, users will see their emails displayed in simple chronological order, as they are in many other email clients.
According to the Google Enterprise blog, the company will soon start rolling out conversation view settings to users in organizations with the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the Google Apps control panel (there’s a handy guide for admins who’d like to enable this option here).
Of course, users who really don’t like the conversation view always had the option of sticking with whatever desktop client they were comfortable with and connecting to their Gmail account using IMAP. This move is no doubt designed to help to encourage business users to switch to Gmail from those traditional desktop clients, which will also allow them to better integrate with other Google products like Calendar, Tasks and Docs.
Would you disable conversation view, given the option?
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