[leephillips]

Yes, the article seems to be confused in a few ways. The fact is that Gmail is not a real email user agent, because of a handful of deficiencies; the most critical of these is the lack of conversation threading. This article (https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/) shows in detail how Gmail is broken and how a non-broken email client (mutt in this case) does things more usefully.

[saurik]

The context behind this article is that a lot of people (not me) find the innovative thing about Gmail is precisely that it doesn't render email threads as messages built into trees, but instead clusters them into these flat groups (which FWIW I think most people do associate with the term "thread", as you are browsing by thread, not by message). The article then goes through how they came to this new model, rather than merely implementing the thing which every other client does. And like, while you and I dislike this way of using email, it really now is so popular that everyone else feels like they have to copy it as it really is that popular.

[leephillips]

I guess you’re right, unfortunately. I don’t think of Gmail as an email client, but rather as something like a slow, badly implemented web-based chat program that uses the smtp protocol. And that spies on your messages.

[JohnFen]

OK, but that can't be realistically described as solving an "impossible problem". The problem is how to associate emails into threads -- which was solved before gmail came around.

What you're talking about is how those threads are presented to the user. That's just a UI decision, not solving something difficult.

[saurik]

Many people consider(ed) the problem of how to present email in a way that they understand -- not a crazy tree exposing the underlying reply structure -- difficult, as they had never experienced such.

[JohnFen]

They may not have experienced such, but threading presented this way was already a well-established thing before gmail. Not so much with email as with newsgroups, but still.

Also, some people considering a problem "hard" is an entirely different thing than a problem being widely considered as "impossible". This was not anything close to an impossible problem.