Email Threading

[AdamS]

I'm not sure if this has been suggested before, but email threading would be a huge benefit if it's possible.

 

With the paragraph analysis and family detection already part of Intella would it be possible to have the ability to thread large email chains and only display the last email in the chain?

 

I can see some difficulties here where multiple parties are involved and they may reply/forward at different stages so there may be multiple chains that vary slightly, but even in these cases if the threshold is set very high then we should be able to avoid excluding any of these partial duplicate chains.

 

That way if a new chain is created part way through by someone forwarding/cc to a new member then you would essentially have 2 final emails for the chains, the first half of both final emails may be identical, but then the remaining portions would be different enough that they were identified as individual chains.

[Andrej]

Hi AdamS,

 

email threading would indeed be a very nice feature, especially if it would hide or gray out the previous emails in the thread and user would only see the last reply. It would certainly speed up review since the user would not have to re-read parts of thread that could have been already read.

 

Would you agree that the previous emails in the thread should be collapsed or grayed out? Or would you prefer to have those completely removed and perhaps have just some kind of reference to the thread?

 

As about the difficult situations, it was longer time since I looked into email threading and possible implementation, but from what I remember there should be certain headers, which indicate the thread it belongs to. The issue here might be that some mail software sometimes puts other, less useful information into these headers.

 

Perhaps comparing subject and paragraphs could help out in identifying the thread?

[AdamS]

Hi Andrej, I think some sort of reference to the chain might be the way to go. For example, I search for my keyword which appears in the 4th email in a chain of 12, Intella displays the last email in the chain (contains all previous 11 emails) with the keyword highlighted in the usual fashion so i can scroll down and find the responsive hit.

 

Then on the left hand menu where we already have the option to 'view parent item' or 'redact' etc, have a new link to 'show all thread emails' or similar. Clicking on this would then display all 12 emails in the same manner as if I'd clicked on 'show all children' or 'show parents' etc.

 

With regards to the abnormal header information that may occur then I agree, a combination of the header, subject and paragraph analysis could be used, but I guess only some testing would identify how accurate that will be. It may be that for those emails the threading won't work as effectively but for the vast majority I think it will work well.