Webmail “Thread View” is now a preference

One of the features of our new(ish) Webmail system is “thread view”. This groups similar messages together based on their “Subject” and other headers, which can occasionally be useful if you’re trying to see all the replies to a particular message and you want them grouped together.

However, thread view has a potential downside: it you have several active threads going with several messages each, new messages can sometimes appear on the second page of the incoming mail screens, instead of the first page.

That’s not a problem if you’re expecting it. However, since we introduced the new Webmail system, we’ve had several complaints from customers who accidentally clicked “Switch to Thread View” without realizing what it does, then thought some of their incoming mail was missing because they aren’t used to looking for new mail on other pages. Since thread view is “remembered” even after you logout and login again, this caused some people a great deal of heartache.

From our logs, we’ve found that very few people actually use thread view. Because it seems to cause frequent problems and few people use it, we’ve made it an optional feature instead of being always enabled.

If (like most people) you don’t use thread view, you don’t need to do anything. If do you want to use thread view, it’s still available: just click “Preferences”, then click “Display Preferences”, then change “Show ‘Thread View’ Link” to “Yes”.