Apple’s bizarre iOS 4 email-threading decision
I waited longer than many to upgrade my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, because I was on holiday when it was released, and also Drop7 hadn’t been updated (it has now). The experience has so far been variable—while Camera is now insanely fast, Angry Birds regularly judders; I enjoy Apple’s implementation of multitasking but it’s clear it’s been responsible for totally freezing the iPhone for the first time; and folders are a joy, but moving icons around is now even more of a finicky process.
It’s Mail, though, that truly offers the best and worst updates. On the plus side, the absurd dance back and forth to access accounts has been banished via the ‘All Mailboxes’ view (although it often freezes while downloading email from multiple accounts), but the way Apple has implemented automated threading is bonkers.
The way things work is fine until you actually bother to read something. Emails that are part of a thread are gathered together and flagged by a number denoting the messages in the thread. Tap it and you see the overviews of the thread’s messages, in reverse chronological order, so the latest one is at the top. This is all fine, but in the mailbox the thread’s overview is shown not by the most recent message, but by the earliest available one—and this changes depending on how many messages Mail is allowed to store.
The net result of this is that when threading is turned on, you see several new messages and then a very old one, followed by more new ones. To see an overview of the latest reply to a thread, you have to enter it, which is absolutely horrid from a usability standpoint. Not only should this action not be forced, but users shouldn’t see an overview and then jump to an entirely different message—it’s confusing.
Apple should make Mail threads show an overview of the latest email within the thread—something that would be logical and helpful. At the very least there should be a setting for this.
I totally agree, the Mail threading feature in ios4 is a great idea that was simply implemented WRONG by Apple. Amazing considering how good they usually are with usability aspects of design.
As you say, they don’t show the most recent email of a thread in the inbox, so you may not realize that there even was a more recent response to a thread. I think they are showing the oldest email the is still unread. To avoid the situation where you continue to ignore a long chain and then fail to notice that your boss has just responded… You need to do into the thread and open/close each email so the blue circle goes away. Then exit the thread. Noe you will see the preview of new messages on this thread in your inbox. HORRIBLE DESIGN. hope they fix this soon.
I’ve used both Yahoo Mail (webmail) and Outlook Express for years, and neither have a threading feature. I sometimes struggle with Google Mail, either finding the right e-mail or spotting there is a reply/more recent message.