Freron MailMate

"Group messages" rather than "Organize by thread"

I have come to realize that "Organize by thread" does not show the whole message thread. It can only do so for the messages in the Inbox.

So if somebody selects "Organize by thread" and does not see all messages of that conversation (like one has come to expect since Gmail entered the scene), he or she will become confused or disapointed. Especially since the hierarchical structure of the messages clearly reflect a conversation, just like messages shown in old school Newslist clients.

If the function was renamed to "Group messages" and the messages were grouped in a single level flat group (all messages in a "thread" are placed inside a common row with a common background color e.g.), I think that the functionality would be better aligned with the naming and visualization.

Conversation Inbox Layout

While messing around with my layout, I discovered that if I selected all the messages in the main outline when it was showing my inbox and turned on "Organize by Thread" in my Thread outline, I got a "true" Conversation Inbox (as made popular by Gmail).

Would it be possible to create this view without needing to select messages in a source outline? E.g. "For all messages in the selected folder, display all messages associated by thread-id"? I think this would be great! (one would have to highlight the source mailbox in some way perhaps so that people are made aware of that this view is not a real folder?).

Thanks for a great mail client!