Comment by sirclueless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirclueless | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate that someone is making an email app for power users. It does a lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's priority inbox (I leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done" tasks, and star items I want to revisit in the distant future). On the other hand, I have grown so accustomed to Gmail's conversation view that there is no way I can give it up, even for a really good service, and it doesn't look like Mail Pilot has this feature.

Gmail's conversation view is in my opinion a nearly insurmountable barrier to entry for other companies. 1) It's a tough natural language processing task, which means startups have trouble with it. 2) It requires someone algorithmically reading all my emails, which means it's such a PR nightmare to even try it that only Google is willing to weather the storm.

"It does a lot of the things I am currently forced to hack onto Gmail's priority inbox (I leave items I need to revisit in my inbox, archive "done" tasks, and star items I want to revisit in the distant future)."

I solved this problem by no longer using my email as a task management tool. Emails that contain a new task get forwarded to Asana, where tasks are easier to deal with. This approach is closer to the Unix philosophy of narrowly scoped tools that can be effectively combined, and it's a philosophy that hasn't failed me yet.

"Gmail's conversation view is ... a tough natural language processing task"

Is it? How is it more than a different way of presenting threads?

Technically, it is like threads, but it includes messages from other directories that belong to the thread, thus showing you the whole coversation including your answers and archived messages.

Graphically, it shows all the messages in a continuous stream as opposed to only one message at a time. Since you now see all responses at once, there is no need for quoting any more, so quotes are collapsed.

I don't use Gmail any more, but conversation view is all but essential for me, too.

"It's a tough natural language processing task"

It doesn't seem to be. For most part, it's the same e-mail headers that every other e-mail client uses to show threads: http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

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