I worked at a place that had many customers who used a major free email provider that also ran an ad network (but was not Google or Microsoft) that kept deciding that most mail we sent to our customers was spam: receipts, installation instructions, responses from support, and notices that subscriptions were going to re-bill were all blocked.
We'd contact them, they would fix things, and it would work for a while...but invariably it would go back to classifying it all as spam, and we'd get customers calling to complain about not getting instructions or support responses.
Finally, our guy who managed our ad spending called up our rep in ad sales at the email company, and asked in rather forceful terms just why we should continue spending $large_number/month on ads there to acquire new customers, when we were then going to be blocked from emailing those customers?
The ad rep conference called in their head of IT, who conference called in their engineer in charge of spam filtering, and had him right there add us to a whitelist that would prevent anything from us being classified as spam no matter what the rest of their spam system decided. As far as I know we never had another email go into the spam filter.
If we hadn't been spending a large amount on ads with them, I doubt the problem would ever have been resolved.
If you sell a software product to end users, and have non-marketing messages that you need users to see such as responses to support requests or reminders that subscriptions are going to automatically re-bill, I'd recommend including some kind of messaging system specifically for this in the product itself. Still send them as email, but also send them via this in-product channel, or at least send notices that there is a message with links to a way to view it on the web. Email only is simply not reliable enough.
That is because implementations, especially gmail, ignore the specifications: (EDIT) there are specific error codes and messages should be sent back to the originator. The reasons to ignore it is, in theory, not to give spammers ideas how to avoid it.
Email is incredibly reliable, it can tolerate outages, configuration errors, delays, etc, by specification, but ever since "modern" spam filtering, gmail (and those who follow their practices) it became a nightmare, because everyone ignores how it _should_ work. It was done in a time when connections were slow and prone to errors; it had to be flexible.
Yes, I know spam was bad I was there. But I'd rather have spam, than actually important mails getting dropped because of false positive, paranoid spamfilters.
They all go through some provider who can block you.
It’s a rare product that people check on their own without notifications!
Any ideas how to reach people without gatekeepers? I have just one way: a desktop app or mobile app that is allowed to periodically wake up and poll a server.
I have a Gmail nightmare story from a couple of years ago.
The company I work for was sending confirmation emails doing everything properly: separate IP range mx boxes, warmed up, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, all the bells and whistles. Nothing else was allowed to go through them.
Suddenly people weren't getting those confirmation letters. It turned out that soon after Gmail introduced the "Promotions" tab, a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.
We tried going through the official channels - once we got to the end of the tunnel, it told us "we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". That's when we started digging into internal google connections across the company, and thank god, we found someone who know someone, and in was sorted within a couple of hours. (It might have helped that the company spends a lot of money on google ads.)
You should never have been sending mail from noreply@ in the first place. Every message needs to be send from a real mailbox that can receive a reply that will be read by a person. If the message isn’t important enough for that, then it is spam and Gmail was doing the correct thing with it.
>a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.
This is my frustration with Google and their suddenly deciding this is how things should be done. For instance I use my camera to capture receipts, QR codes I may want later and a dozen other things. Google is of the opinion this wastes space so I get regular "Clear up the clutter!" cards. One man's clutter is another man's system of record for important stuff. Stop imposing your opinion on how I should use your product, Google.
Article admits it isn't a bug then continues calling it a "bug." Also the $187M figure is just pulled out of the air.
Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. Users are confused by it, and clicking the oldest password reset link (expired) rather than the newest.
Claims that users being unable to reset their passwords costs Expedia $187M.
Nah, the author does have a point. There's something fundamentally wrong with how Gmail collapses messages. I have email notifications from a certain web store when some of the items I might be interested in come in stock/for preorder. I always read them. Years after I started using it, I discovered that I actually miss reading about 30% of these messages. How does this happen?
Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread. And yet this thread looks identical to a single message. So I click on the thread, read the first message, see the email footer and go back to Inbox to read the next one. This marks the entire thread read even though I didn't actually read the subsequent messages. So I never come around to read them.
I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read.
This is kind of a silly argument to make. How does an end user have any way to know whether a particular behavior is a bug or intentional when the behavior is actively bad?
Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it?
Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of.
I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug!
A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way.
The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.
Author here. Just wanted to say that the metrics are not pulled out of thin air. I prefer to refrain from discussing the internal accounting of firms I worked for.
Many of my customers use Gmail (mostly as part of a company subscription to Apps) and I have frequent problems with their mail getting lost, classified as spam, rejected, filed somewhere, or just difficult to see.
I wonder at which point people will start realizing that Gmail is not all it's cracked up to be. Apart from the privacy issues (you basically have to assume that Google is reading all your mail and mining data from it), Gmail treats your mail as their mail: they will do anything they like with it, including hiding it from you.
If that sounds like a rant, it is — I am worried about the increasingly centralized nature of E-mail.
We've encountered this a lot and when sending emails to organizations that use Google Suite or Gmail. When we explicitly don't want the messages to be grouped our team has began making the subject of the email unique to the request.
e.g instead of:
Subject:"Password Reset Notification" (or)
Subject:"Website Support Request"
we'd use:
Subject:"Your Password Reset Request - March 14th 10:19am" (and)
Subject:"Website Support Request - Jimmy Davis, Failed Login"
If the company can’t figure out how to add a date to the subject line, they won’t be able to figure this out either.
It’s gmails bug, but I’m amazed they couldn’t figure out hiw to implement the fix. Amazed but not too surprised given how not nimble big companies are.
We've been using it for some time as well, not even with a random value, just `X-Entity-Ref-ID: null` works too. Found it through some obscure StackOverflow answer.
The issue is impacting all users who forgot their password, use Gmail (not sure about other clients) and don’t notice the hidden messages being at the bottom (it’s really hard to spot).
So the "bug" is collapsed message/sort/thread view?
Feels like this is about as un-bug-like as you can get. Adding the unique Subject: line feels like the right fix (in you) rather than shout at google "you have a bug"
I am quite surprised by this response, and even more that there are several saying the same thing.
> So the "bug" is collapsed message/sort/thread view?
No - the bug is that new messages were being hidden because they were mischaracterized as redundant.
I quickly disabled Google's 'conversations' feature (or whatever they call it), when it was first introduced, because it did not seem to be doing a good job, but did not think about its wider implications.
I probably should not be surprised about these reactions, as I have had experience with fellow developers who insist that what is manifestly a bug is not one because it is "working as designed", or because there is an undocumented workaround to the undocumented problem.
While a whimsical writing and storytelling style sometimes works great, in this case it makes the article very confusing, even contradictory in places.
I also find their numbers very hard to believe. Expedia's net income last year was ~$400M. They could apparently make a 60-character fix and increase that by $187M but they don't, because...reasons?
The defense of gmail in the other comments is bizarre. Gmail suffers from a number of similar, very serious usability issues. From the perspective of the user, failing to show the correct password reset email is a bug in gmail that affects many sites.
A less advanced non-threaded show-most-recent email view would not suffer from this issue. When you add a more advanced feature, make it the default, and inadvertently reduce usability, you are at fault.
A few years ago, on Nu Gmail (Ajaxy Gmail) but pre-Inbox, I tried to walk my grandma through adding a contact.
Their add contact screen, with the form to fill in contact info, had two same-colored buttons, not that far apart, same copy. One added the contact whose info you'd just been putting in. The other helpfully erased it (add a new contact, was what that one meant).
That's probably been fixed, but the whole settings area was kinda that way back then—like someone slapped it together without once thinking about how it'd be used. IDK what it's like now now, I use basic HTML gmail.
[EDIT] who's to whose. I cannot believe I wrote that.
I won't defend Gmail, but not testing critical email with the most popular client seems unwise. And, tracking failed resets for popular domains seems like a good idea.
> The defense of gmail in the other comments is bizarre.
This statement is bizarre, I don't really see anyone defending Gmail here - just commenters offering further explanation on what's happening and other people mentioning specific examples of being caught out by this behaviour.
Gmail's user experience is terrible in many ways, but I don't think it's fair to excoriate them for adding a feature that's not so idiot proof that not even one in a hundred users will misapprehend how to use it. That school of ultra-spacious user friendly designs for the lowest common denominator is how we ended up with the nightmare that is the current Gmail interface.
I had never used Gmail until a few month ago when I switched jobs and my current company uses GSuites.
The Gmail UI is horrible, the amount of confusion it creates and how illogical it does collapse and order things amazes me. Why not just show me the content as it is and let me figure out how to handle it?
You can disable conversations and view all individual messages in the chronological order without any grouping.
But it will not solve other UX issues, like the fact that gmail UI encourages top-posting, even if the sender replied inside the body of the original e-mail. (it skillfully hides the option to reply inline inside the quoted body, even in this case)
It also makes a complete mess when you write responses inside the quoted text, if you're not extremely careful and aware of this fact.
Now someone tell me this is not a complete garbage!
Honestly, conversing with gmail users is my least favorite thing, as long as they use the web client. Gmail webmail is not a serious e-mail client. It does not even implement threading.
Google should indeed fix every single UX issue, however minor, given its operation scale.
That said, such overblown criticisms reminds me of the quote "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses". It's true for everything.
I just want my colorful threading back. Every time someone 'improves' the Gmail UI, it gets harder and harder to use.
Back when each new message in a thread had a different-colored header, it was vastly easier to use by skimming.
Now, with everything in various shades of monochrome, threads collapsed or expanded, quotes hidden or not hidden, signatures here and there, it's virtually impossible to tell at a glance where one message begin and the other one ends.
All Gmail would have to do to fix the issue is consider the link target when diffing to determine which part is quoted from previous messages.
I've noticed this myself on the occasion I end up requesting a password reset multiple times. It's annoying at best to have to click open a closed message and then click again to show the quoted text. I'm sure it took me a minute to figure out what was going on the first time I encountered this.
I opted for one email sent/received, display one line option in Gmail eons ago. The collapsed email format is complete bollocks with one small exception... coming back to work after a vacation. Collapsed view allows for reading a series of emails to acquaint with how a particular subject evolved over time while away.
So after vacation > turn collapse back on > clean up vacation built up email > turn collapse off again
Edit: oh, I also proactively search for "lost" emails with the following search string:
has:nouserlabels -label:inbox -label:drafts
With my workflow, I apply a label to everything I want to save when I move it out of the inbox, meaning I've finished dealing with whatever the email requires. So that search string finds whatever has fallen out of my workflow.
...okay, I have a very vague memory of this being straight up announced by Google as a new feature back around 2002-2005.
Basically, if I'm remembering right, there was a semi-standard header field in emails that used some sort of hash to identify which email was being replied to. This was how emails were threaded together in other clients, and worked well for the most part.
But there were some situations where it didn't work accurately, leaving some emails un-threaded, so Google created its new conversation view to both flatten the reply tree (so you'd see all emails so far before responding, instead of making the same reply as someone else) and group up emails sent from clients that didn't include the hash.
The concept of collapsed email threads is a terrible idea for the typical user. It probably only makes sense for public figures who get a ton of unsolicited emails (whoever designed Gmail must have been a public figure). It also would explain why Marissa Mayer redesigned Yahoo mail to have collapsed email threads by default.
The average person doesn't get so many emails that they need to have them collapsed and sorted based on the sender. Most people don't have a problem reading every email in their inbox each day - In fact, that's what they want to do.
[+] [-] tzs|7 years ago|reply
We'd contact them, they would fix things, and it would work for a while...but invariably it would go back to classifying it all as spam, and we'd get customers calling to complain about not getting instructions or support responses.
Finally, our guy who managed our ad spending called up our rep in ad sales at the email company, and asked in rather forceful terms just why we should continue spending $large_number/month on ads there to acquire new customers, when we were then going to be blocked from emailing those customers?
The ad rep conference called in their head of IT, who conference called in their engineer in charge of spam filtering, and had him right there add us to a whitelist that would prevent anything from us being classified as spam no matter what the rest of their spam system decided. As far as I know we never had another email go into the spam filter.
If we hadn't been spending a large amount on ads with them, I doubt the problem would ever have been resolved.
If you sell a software product to end users, and have non-marketing messages that you need users to see such as responses to support requests or reminders that subscriptions are going to automatically re-bill, I'd recommend including some kind of messaging system specifically for this in the product itself. Still send them as email, but also send them via this in-product channel, or at least send notices that there is a message with links to a way to view it on the web. Email only is simply not reliable enough.
[+] [-] pmlnr|7 years ago|reply
That is because implementations, especially gmail, ignore the specifications: (EDIT) there are specific error codes and messages should be sent back to the originator. The reasons to ignore it is, in theory, not to give spammers ideas how to avoid it.
Email is incredibly reliable, it can tolerate outages, configuration errors, delays, etc, by specification, but ever since "modern" spam filtering, gmail (and those who follow their practices) it became a nightmare, because everyone ignores how it _should_ work. It was done in a time when connections were slow and prone to errors; it had to be flexible.
Yes, I know spam was bad I was there. But I'd rather have spam, than actually important mails getting dropped because of false positive, paranoid spamfilters.
[+] [-] EGreg|7 years ago|reply
SMS
Notifications
They all go through some provider who can block you.
It’s a rare product that people check on their own without notifications!
Any ideas how to reach people without gatekeepers? I have just one way: a desktop app or mobile app that is allowed to periodically wake up and poll a server.
[+] [-] pmlnr|7 years ago|reply
The company I work for was sending confirmation emails doing everything properly: separate IP range mx boxes, warmed up, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, all the bells and whistles. Nothing else was allowed to go through them.
Suddenly people weren't getting those confirmation letters. It turned out that soon after Gmail introduced the "Promotions" tab, a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.
We tried going through the official channels - once we got to the end of the tunnel, it told us "we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". That's when we started digging into internal google connections across the company, and thank god, we found someone who know someone, and in was sorted within a couple of hours. (It might have helped that the company spends a lot of money on google ads.)
Gmail is lovely.
[+] [-] gnu8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofiend|7 years ago|reply
This is my frustration with Google and their suddenly deciding this is how things should be done. For instance I use my camera to capture receipts, QR codes I may want later and a dozen other things. Google is of the opinion this wastes space so I get regular "Clear up the clutter!" cards. One man's clutter is another man's system of record for important stuff. Stop imposing your opinion on how I should use your product, Google.
[+] [-] Someone1234|7 years ago|reply
Essentially Gmail (and other mail services) put messages from the same sender with the same subject into a Conversation View. Users are confused by it, and clicking the oldest password reset link (expired) rather than the newest.
Claims that users being unable to reset their passwords costs Expedia $187M.
[+] [-] Grue3|7 years ago|reply
Well, it turns out that Google randomly groups some of these messages in a single thread. And yet this thread looks identical to a single message. So I click on the thread, read the first message, see the email footer and go back to Inbox to read the next one. This marks the entire thread read even though I didn't actually read the subsequent messages. So I never come around to read them.
I completely believe that most users will not read any email in the thread beyond the first one, because there's absolutely no indication there's more stuff to read.
[+] [-] cesarb|7 years ago|reply
IMO, gmail is in the wrong here. If the message id is not in the References or the In-Reply-To header, it's a new conversation.
[+] [-] kevingadd|7 years ago|reply
Recurring messages having the same title is an absurdly common pattern. Almost every service that has ever sent me a password reset email has used the same exact subject. Same goes for things like shipment notifications, order confirmations, purchase confirmations from PayPal, etc. So given this, it's kind of absurd that a MUA would be designed in a way that buries all those emails, isn't it?
Let's assume that it really is intentional that gmail buries all those messages, on some presumption that they aren't important or on a 'well fuck you, change it then' basis. There definitely are services out there that append random numbers to the end of automated emails. I always assumed this was to make it easy to sort threads by unique id, i.e. customer service systems - so maybe they've been applying an undocumented Gmail Best Practice this whole time. Assuming that this is a good feature implemented correctly, why does unread/read status not work right? If I click into a 50 email long unread thread and then click back why is it INSTANTLY marked read? How is that a useful behavior that would seem intended to anyone? Non-threaded views like in Outlook do not work this way. The common 'reply up top, history at bottom' email formatting also avoids this problem, which you'd think the gmail frontend designers would be aware of.
I would argue that both behaviors are either a bug or user-hostile design. Calling it a bug is generous to the designers because it assumes goodwill and just views it as an oversight or error in a very complex system. I'd personally be inclined to call it bad design, because Gmail is full of bad design, but there's nothing weird or bad about a user calling it a bug!
A $187M figure is super realistic to me given how often I see this particular problem affect me. It literally happens daily. Naturally, I learned years ago that gmail does this and got used to having to dig through my email history to find out where a notification went, but it's still a bad behavior and it still catches me unaware sometimes. I've missed important emails this way.
The difficulty of maintaining Inbox Zero in 2019 also combines poorly with these behaviors - when a notification for password reset or whatever gets threaded in to an email with an old date on it, it can make it harder for your brain to process what just happened.
[+] [-] user5994461|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feketegy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brahma111|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|7 years ago|reply
I wonder at which point people will start realizing that Gmail is not all it's cracked up to be. Apart from the privacy issues (you basically have to assume that Google is reading all your mail and mining data from it), Gmail treats your mail as their mail: they will do anything they like with it, including hiding it from you.
If that sounds like a rant, it is — I am worried about the increasingly centralized nature of E-mail.
[+] [-] reitzensteinm|7 years ago|reply
In the real world, the buck stops with you. Even if it's not fair, if there's an issue your users are having, you need to fix it.
At their scale, there is no excuse for not polishing every minute aspect of the UX, and that it includes how it interacts with every email service.
Expedia stole 187m from themselves by not having their shit together.
[+] [-] erikig|7 years ago|reply
e.g instead of:
Subject:"Password Reset Notification" (or) Subject:"Website Support Request"
we'd use:
Subject:"Your Password Reset Request - March 14th 10:19am" (and) Subject:"Website Support Request - Jimmy Davis, Failed Login"
[+] [-] rgrove|7 years ago|reply
When you send an email that you don't want to be collapsed into any previous thread on Gmail, include an `X-Entity-Ref-ID` header with a random value.
I don't remember where I learned this. I can't seem to find any official documentation mentioning it. But it works.
[+] [-] quantumhobbit|7 years ago|reply
It’s gmails bug, but I’m amazed they couldn’t figure out hiw to implement the fix. Amazed but not too surprised given how not nimble big companies are.
[+] [-] bluetech|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davewasthere|7 years ago|reply
e.g. [email protected]
Otherwise a unique subject is always easy for some people.
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
So the "bug" is collapsed message/sort/thread view?
Feels like this is about as un-bug-like as you can get. Adding the unique Subject: line feels like the right fix (in you) rather than shout at google "you have a bug"
[+] [-] mannykannot|7 years ago|reply
> So the "bug" is collapsed message/sort/thread view?
No - the bug is that new messages were being hidden because they were mischaracterized as redundant.
I quickly disabled Google's 'conversations' feature (or whatever they call it), when it was first introduced, because it did not seem to be doing a good job, but did not think about its wider implications.
I probably should not be surprised about these reactions, as I have had experience with fellow developers who insist that what is manifestly a bug is not one because it is "working as designed", or because there is an undocumented workaround to the undocumented problem.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxy|7 years ago|reply
I also find their numbers very hard to believe. Expedia's net income last year was ~$400M. They could apparently make a 60-character fix and increase that by $187M but they don't, because...reasons?
[+] [-] feifan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|7 years ago|reply
Changes can be impossibly difficult in large companies for no particular reason.
[+] [-] abtinf|7 years ago|reply
A less advanced non-threaded show-most-recent email view would not suffer from this issue. When you add a more advanced feature, make it the default, and inadvertently reduce usability, you are at fault.
[+] [-] asark|7 years ago|reply
Their add contact screen, with the form to fill in contact info, had two same-colored buttons, not that far apart, same copy. One added the contact whose info you'd just been putting in. The other helpfully erased it (add a new contact, was what that one meant).
That's probably been fixed, but the whole settings area was kinda that way back then—like someone slapped it together without once thinking about how it'd be used. IDK what it's like now now, I use basic HTML gmail.
[EDIT] who's to whose. I cannot believe I wrote that.
[+] [-] tyingq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magduf|7 years ago|reply
What, you can't remember literally dozens of different passwords from different sites, that all have differing and incompatible password requirements?
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
This statement is bizarre, I don't really see anyone defending Gmail here - just commenters offering further explanation on what's happening and other people mentioning specific examples of being caught out by this behaviour.
[+] [-] brianpgordon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerng|7 years ago|reply
The Gmail UI is horrible, the amount of confusion it creates and how illogical it does collapse and order things amazes me. Why not just show me the content as it is and let me figure out how to handle it?
[+] [-] megous|7 years ago|reply
But it will not solve other UX issues, like the fact that gmail UI encourages top-posting, even if the sender replied inside the body of the original e-mail. (it skillfully hides the option to reply inline inside the quoted body, even in this case)
It also makes a complete mess when you write responses inside the quoted text, if you're not extremely careful and aware of this fact.
For example these are identical messages:
As gmail user sent it: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/gmail-garbage2.png
As I received it (text e-mail message gmail actually generated): https://megous.com/dl/tmp/gmail-garbage4.png
Now someone tell me this is not a complete garbage!
Honestly, conversing with gmail users is my least favorite thing, as long as they use the web client. Gmail webmail is not a serious e-mail client. It does not even implement threading.
[+] [-] shay_ker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerash|7 years ago|reply
That said, such overblown criticisms reminds me of the quote "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses". It's true for everything.
[+] [-] rconti|7 years ago|reply
Back when each new message in a thread had a different-colored header, it was vastly easier to use by skimming.
Now, with everything in various shades of monochrome, threads collapsed or expanded, quotes hidden or not hidden, signatures here and there, it's virtually impossible to tell at a glance where one message begin and the other one ends.
[+] [-] williamscales|7 years ago|reply
I've noticed this myself on the occasion I end up requesting a password reset multiple times. It's annoying at best to have to click open a closed message and then click again to show the quoted text. I'm sure it took me a minute to figure out what was going on the first time I encountered this.
[+] [-] rabboRubble|7 years ago|reply
So after vacation > turn collapse back on > clean up vacation built up email > turn collapse off again
Edit: oh, I also proactively search for "lost" emails with the following search string:
has:nouserlabels -label:inbox -label:drafts
With my workflow, I apply a label to everything I want to save when I move it out of the inbox, meaning I've finished dealing with whatever the email requires. So that search string finds whatever has fallen out of my workflow.
[+] [-] Izkata|7 years ago|reply
Basically, if I'm remembering right, there was a semi-standard header field in emails that used some sort of hash to identify which email was being replied to. This was how emails were threaded together in other clients, and worked well for the most part.
But there were some situations where it didn't work accurately, leaving some emails un-threaded, so Google created its new conversation view to both flatten the reply tree (so you'd see all emails so far before responding, instead of making the same reply as someone else) and group up emails sent from clients that didn't include the hash.
And now we're here.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shereadsthenews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|7 years ago|reply
The average person doesn't get so many emails that they need to have them collapsed and sorted based on the sender. Most people don't have a problem reading every email in their inbox each day - In fact, that's what they want to do.