True Threaded Conversations in Thunderbird

[MichaelTunnell]

At the moment, #Thunderbird does not have true threaded conversations but more a simplistic form of threading where it only takes received emails and groups them together. Thunderbird needs true threaded conversations (which includes your own sent emails) built-in by default. Conversations is a feature that is available by default in most modern email clients like GMail, Outlook, and more so the lack of this feature in Thunderbird really stands out as missing something critical.

Here is an addon that tries to compensate for Thunderbird not having this feature but this has issues of its own. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/

Thunderbird used to be the go to email client for recommending but now it is far behind in modern features. I think this is one of those features that Thunderbird needs to compete in the current modern email client space.

Link to a bug report I made on this subject over 2 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1686504

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[whitenight12]

this would be amazing!!

[dasnan2]

Lack of true conversation threads is the biggest complaint I hear about Thunderbird. All my friends and family are used to Gmail's interface thanks to decades of dominance by Google. Now when I try to get them off Google with an alternate email host and Thunderbird they find reading and managing threads frustrating and confusing.

[Toolworker]

Would this also solve the issue where a reply with a new subject is grouped in the same thread as the message replied to? Or would that be a different idea?

[MattAuSupport]

@Toolworker, completely different

[pulse]

As helpful as the Thunderbird Conversations add-on is, having a native threaded conversation view in Thunderbird would make for a much better user experience. A threaded conversation view is table stakes for any email client in 2023, having been the default view used by most of the major desktop, mobile, and webmail clients for the past decade. I would like to see Thunderbird adopt a threaded conversation view by default, but retain the option to disable this view for anyone who would like to opt out.

[trisweb]

Agree with this 100%. The default thread behavior is unlike any other email application, and breaks the thread mental model. Thunderbird needs to pull in and support full threads by default in a fresh install, especially if they are enabled by default.

[wsmwk]

Work is in progress. However there is still a long road ahead.

[tristanj]

Connected here just to upvote and boost this issue.

I have recently switched to Thunderbird, because of the promising "Supernova" release, and my biggest pain point is the lack of a proper conversation view. It is super frustrating, and IMO, even makes the software unusable for daily email conversations. The nesting feature in the email list is also very confusing.

Other than that, thank you to all contributors for their work!

[PSz]

Postbox is example of optimal implementation.

It would be a good idea to review how it works there so as not to reinvent the wheel.

[AlexP]

As a newish Thunderbird user, this is one of my biggest gripes because the current threading implementation is just incomplete.  By excluding messages from other folders, you are not showing a true thread of messages, you're only showing a group of related emails in the current folder - that's not a thread.  It makes email management messy because I now have to go and hunt in other folders to find related emails. Worse still, there is an add-on that offers this feature, but it seems every time there is a new Thunderbird release, the add-on breaks. I don't know if that's intentional from Thunderbird...?  I'd love to see this as a priority - if you're hoping to attract users from other email clients (like Outlook), this feels like a serious roadblock to moving across, at least for me.

And then just to add to the above, I've just watched the video explaining why this is such a big technical challenge for Thunderbird. So I understand why it's such a huge undertaking and I am patiently waiting for it to happen. The underlying changes that need to happen to the Thunderbird database first will probably lead to lots of other awesome changes in future.