[Thu Sep 25 16:01:35 CDT 2014]

At work we have been wondering for a while how come that there are people who are so thin-skinned that, as soon as a few people start sending messages to an internal mailing list joking about this or that, they opt for unsubscribing from the list. When asked, they usually reply that they cannot stand the "spam" (meaning, at least in this case, what they consider meaningless chatter, instead of serious work). Obviously, the automatic reaction from most other people is to assume that they take life too seriously. There are some of that, of course. However, it recently dawned on me that certain email clients do make it a pain to deal with email in a context like this. What do I mean? Well, there are times when I have to log into the corporate web-based interface to access Microsoft Outlook to view my email from the IMAP server (instead of using mutt, which is what I normally do). So, what do I see when I do this? Outlook, at least not in its default configuration, does not show the different email conversations using threads, but rather it displays all messages one after another. Yes, there is an option that one can change in the preferences that will lump all messages from the same thread together. Still, that will not show the clear threads and subthread that other email clients display, thus making it more difficult to easily identify which messages belong to a given thread that may not interest me, and can therefore be ignored. The funny thing about all this is that back in the 1990s, as far as I can remember, most GUI email clients did have this feature that the developers of MS Outlook did not appear to like. {link to this entry}