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Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow you just reminded me threaded emails weren't commonplace until Gmail and I'm having horrible flashbacks.

> Gmail

Ok, so that's why people want threaded view? I've always thought that was puzzling, as I don't use it myself (neither threads nor Google).

Gmail might have gotten the inspiration after they purchased DejaNews and made the Usenet archive into Google Groups. Just a guess.

Usenet was always threaded in the clients I used back then. But for somme reason threaded email does not work for me, personally.

Threaded email is great.

Gmail has a thing I don't know who else has. The emails are categorized in General, Social Networks, Ads and Informative Updates.

this is an idea first popularized by Gmail Inbox, an app from days yore. later adopted by Gmail itself, and Spark email, at least.

Even text based email clients like mutt and gnus supported threads. And they were proper threads like we have on HN. I don't fully understand why Gmail had to reinvent threads but I think a big part was Microsoft's god awful email clients not sending messages properly such that other clients could thread them. Because, of course, their client didn't even support threads so why should anyone have them?

It is so easy to forget how things used to be terrible before.

Like an email chain that keeps adding Re in the subject line

> Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re:

What? Threaded emails were present back in Eudora and were always in Evolution and Thunderbird, no? Weren't they even on newsgroup readers?

Present in specialist clients like Eudora, perhaps, but I think for mass-market users that only touched webmail and Outlook the introduction of threading in Gmail must have seemed heavenly.

Eudora was -the mass-market-client back in Win 3.1 (along with Trumpet TCP/IP package)

I never said Gmail invented threaded emails, just that it brought threaded emails to the masses. Outlook and almost all webmail didn't have threading support at the time.

What's the difference between that and everything always had threads except Outlook?

Opera's email client had them too, I know I was using that around 2000. It was the first time I'd seen the feature, and it was one of the major reasons I used Opera for as long as I did. But Opera, then as now, was far from mainstream...

Tin. I used tin from mid 90s until around 2005, and it supported threads.

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