[BoppreH]

I tried Thunderbird recently, and was baffled that there seemed to be no way to see received emails grouped with my responses to them (aka threading or conversations). Even grouping incoming emails that have the same subject seemed like an experimental feature.

Surely I'm missing something? How are people using it? If someone replies to you "I think there was a problem with your attachment", do you search for your sent email?

[commoner]

Thunderbird supports threading in the message list pane (which displays replies next to the email that was replied to), but a conversation mode for the message pane is still in development:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/true-threaded-conversat...

In the meantime, the Thunderbird Conversations add-on provides a conversation view that looks like classic Gmail, which is probably what you're looking for:

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail...

[BoppreH]

I had seen both of these. The add-on implementation is too complicated and affects too many systems (contacts, attachments, etc) that change frequently, so it had many subtle bugs and unimplemented features: https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...

As for the Message List Pane, maybe that's something I missed, I'll take another look.

[sylens]

It’s been there for a while https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thund...

[BoppreH]

I had tried this, but the grouping only happened among messages of each folder. And Sent is a separate folder, so it doesn't get included.

Or did I miss something? Do you see your replies in the threaded view?

[PurpleRamen]

Thunderbird has a folder-based organization, so out of the box can it only group mails per folder. What you want is a GMail-view/organization, where all mails are in one folder. But this will probably not work well with bigger amounts of mails, because Thunderbird is not optimized for this, especially when the mails are on a remote server.

[BoppreH]

Which one do you use? I'm really curious if there's an alternative workflow that is just as good as GMail-view, or people just learn to accept the limitations.

[PurpleRamen]

I don't use threads, because people in my business are very active in sending the whole history in EACH mail, and others communications have a web-frontend.

But if you need threading so much, you could also just move your send mails with the rest of the mails, there is a setting with the server-confg, which defines what is to be done with send mails, which by default saves a copy in the Sent-folder. You could also check out filters and labels.

And looking at the roadmap of thunderbird, there is some plan about a global database, which reads as if this might allow a Gmail-style frontend somewhere in the future. So maybe next year threading might a more solved problem..

[BoppreH]

> because people in my business are very active in sending the whole history in EACH mail,

Unfortunately that quoted history is not easily navigable and doesn't include attachments.

> there is a setting with the server-confg, which defines what is to be done with send mail

I looked into it, but it unfortunately only applies to future messages sent. Typing this I just realized that I could maybe move my existing sent messages into the uber-folder, I'll give that a try.

[bad_username]

Create a virtual folder (saved search) that includes all messages from sent and inbox. Enable threading, and you will have conversations.