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Posted on August 19th, 2009 by Dave Stevenson
Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work
Let’s be clear: Outlook 2010 is good. Very good, actually. And, certainly, if you instructed me to write an email client I’d come back to you with a white box with “INBOX” written on the front in biro.
But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.
Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less.
Problem is, Outlook 2010 isn’t particularly clever when it comes to the science bit. Instead of being smart and looking at to whom an email has been sent, it simply grabs the subject line and lumps any subsequent email with the same subject line into the same conversation. So if you forward an email from a stupid person to a clever person and add a line saying “LOOK AT THIS MORON!”, Outlook will see the subject line and make it look like you’ve accidentally CC’d the idiot. I did this last week and nearly had a heart attack.
Take this screenshot. (These emails, by the way, are different to the one which nearly gave me an aneurism last week.) Greg Salmon does PR for Microsoft Office, Tim Danton is PC Pro’s editor. It looks to the untrained eye like they’re both CC’d in on an email with the subject “Office 2010”, but they’re not. It simply means I’ve sent them separate emails which Outlook has grouped into a conversation.
Microsoft claims Outlook 2010 is more intelligent than that. A spokesman reckons “the scenario of similar or exact subject lines has been accounted for by tracking the GUID [Globally Unique Identifier] of each message,” but I really can’t see it. Take the screenshot below as an example.
Naturally, this is less of a problem if you use nice, descriptive subject lines such as “Meeting on Monday the 25th to discuss the price of tea”, but I don’t. I send messages with stupid subject lines like “I’m…” and finish the rest of the sentence in the body of the email. Or I say things like “Meeting”, and suddenly Outlook thinks I’m taking part in a giant email conversation with 98 recipients.
Microsoft is keen to point out this isn’t the final product. “We are still working on this feature, and are planning improvements to our ability to differentiate conversations with the same subject line before Office 2010 ships”, said our friendly Microsoft spokesperson.
But it’s surprising that, even at this early stage – and remember this is the Technical Preview of Office 2010, it’s not even at Beta yet – the view is so far behind other conversation-threading systems already available.
For example, Gmail offers conversation threading as well, and the technology behind it sounds similar: “Gmail threading is determined by consistency within the subject headers and references headers of email. A subject header is commonly known as the subject line and a reference header appears in the “References” line within the original, raw message information,” according to the company.
That sounds a lot like the GUID that Microsoft’s talking about it but my inboxes don’t lie: Gmail is currently threading my conversations correctly, while Outlook 2010 is very hit and miss.
You can turn it off and arrange messages simply by the “To:” field like in the old days, but I don’t want to. I like the conversation feature. I use it in Gmail all the time and it’s brilliant, and I want it to be brilliant in Outlook 2010. Certainly the rest of the application is golden: searching is nearly instantaneous in my 5,000-strong inbox and I like how a business card pops up onscreen if you hover over an email address. But until Microsoft gets the conversation feature right I’ll be treading a lot more carefully in my emails.
Tags: conversation view, Microsoft Office 2010, Outlook 2010
Posted in: Microsoft Office 2010
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38 Responses to “ Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work ”
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Authors
- Barry Collins
- Chris Brennan
- Christine Horton
- Darien Graham-Smith
- Dave Stevenson
- Davey Winder
- David Bayon
- David Fearon
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- Jon Honeyball
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August 19th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I, for one, welcome our new email overlord!
August 19th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
So, it doesn’t actually follow conversations using the originator Ids and thread them accordingly
Shame, that was the most useful feature of the old mail clients on Linux and Windows, before Outlook came along…
It looks like Microsoft can’t learn old tricks.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Thanks for the feedback Dave – it’s great to see people getting to grips with Outlook 2010 and sharing their experiences of the new features we are adding to the product. Conversation View will continue to evolve in experience and accuracy between the current Technical Preview milestone and our public Beta later this year – hopefully we’ll have an opportunity to get your opinion on whether we’re closer to the mark at that time. If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to “Send a Frown” to register your feedback directly with the engineering team.
August 19th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
So, basically, M$ is admitting it doesn’t do what they say it should be doing. M$ really are complete muppets.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:18 am
This is a technical preview which is not even at a public beta stage yet. If you are surprised some features don’t fully work, then I advise you wait until the RTM version is shipped.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:34 am
I did have a quite lengthy reply to this, but because I forgot to type in the Bl***Y recaptcha box it was thrown away.
General drift was there are message-ID and “in-reply-to” email headers for a reason, whats wrong with using them? Now to type in the stupid “jumping oyster” in the hope this doesn’t get lost.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am
I signed up for the Technical Preview and have been running 2010 ever since. I have had exactly the same problem as Dave. The amount of old but unrelated mail that was grouped together was amazing. However, I fully accept this is early code so I haven’t let it bother me. New mail seems to be getting sorted correctly though. What would have been nice would have been the ability to mark messages as “unrelated” incase the Outlook engine is mistaken. Anyway, I sent feedback via the “frown / smilie” system.
On the whole though, it look and runs great.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
PCPRO Authors and Bloggers:
What no women?
August 20th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Sorry – wrong thread
August 20th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Is this the technical preview you are talking about or someother version?
August 21st, 2009 at 8:06 am
Morning all,
David – Microsoft claims it’s using a GUID, but all I can see it doing is using subject lines.
Chris – A good point about sending a frown. Will do it today.
Alan – You’re quite right, this is the technical preview and it’s unreasonable to expect it to be perfect. I find it a bit surprising that such a major new feature of Outlook currently has such a major flaw, though.
Callum – that is stunningly ironic
Jon – it’s the technical preview.
September 29th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I hate that they got rid of the toolbars. Conversation mode doesn’t work that well. Also you can’t move mail in IMAP mode with Gmail.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
James – do you mean the “ribbon” at the top? I think that’s actually a pretty big improvement on what went before, which was a “here are nearly all the tools you need to get stuff done but not all of them.”
Now it’s “here are the tools you need to get specific things done”.
Also, I use Gmail’s IMAP mode with Outlook 2010 and moving messages between folders works fine for me. Fire off a sad face to Microsoft and see what happens.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Dave: Yeah the ribbon just isn’t working for me in Outlook. I like it when I’m composing emails but the main window works better with the toolbar. Also due to an error I tried recreating an IMAP account and cannot get it to deliver the mail to the older pst file it created just a week ago. It always creates a new one and delivers the mail to that one instead of the older one.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am
For work with outlook files I often use-ms outlook viewer.Software can a lot of features and has got free status.Moreover utility can convert your data to a *.pst file, that can be easily opened by any email client.
October 29th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I’m trying out the Beta Build 4514 and the converstation view is still absolutely useless – and just as you describe.
At least you can turn it off in this version:
- View
- Converstations
- Untick “Show Messages in Coverstations”
This is such an obviously broken feature. I noticed it within about a minute of starting Outlook for the first time!
November 9th, 2009 at 10:02 am
[...] but not fine for generic subjects). Hopefully this will be improved in 2010 (though as of now, initial reports are not good). Still, in many ways it is far superior to the regular inbox view (and unlike Gmail, [...]
November 18th, 2009 at 11:41 am
[...] Conversation views allow you to track what was said and to whom, and when. It reads email to you like a story; starting off at the bottom and working its way through, adding each reply to the very top to keep your conversations to-and-fro organised and seamless. No longer will you have to depend on replies including the original message, even though some strongly disagree. [...]
November 20th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
It’s been like this for as long as I can remember since at least Outlook XP! Fix! Please!
February 5th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Thanks for this great post but what are the file recovery methods that are used in 2010. please mention them in you next blog.
February 16th, 2010 at 12:19 am
I am using Outlook 2010 from Office 2010 RTM-ESCROW 14.0.4734.1000
Same thing with conversation view. Quite dissapointing and pathetic. Messages are sorted by the subject and conversations have emails from different people about different topics. Emails with blank subjects are put in one conversation. I call this feature annoying because it does nothing other than confuse.
Seen a post on technet that it should be using ConversationID but its only going to do so with Exchange 2010. So get ready to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade. This is crap and microsoft can go down the toilet. Moving to gmail. Enough.
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Finally an article that supports my point of view, the conversation view might be a great feature but only if it works which is obviously not the case at the moment. To organise my conversations with a person I use lookeen which is way better: http://www.lookeen.net
March 23rd, 2010 at 7:05 pm
I certainly appreciate the conversation threading feature but I find that in heavy email exchanges it’s sometimes easier to locate things the old way because I may want to reply to a specific email rather than the most recent one. Unfortunately in Outlook Web Access 2010 you can’t turn off Conversation threading. This may sound like whining and I know I can use other methods to find what I’m looking for but to me this is just another example of Microsoft trying to improve an age old standard. It’s not that I don’t want them to keep coming up with new tools but please don’t mess with the standard functionality.
April 7th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
I second David Wright’s comment above, proper threading based on the mail headers is the way to go.
Further, perhaps a ‘thread summary’ view like in Thunderbird 3 – now there is a cool feature!
April 17th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
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April 26th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I had to switch this off as it was so annoying. I was seeing old emails from a previous boss being grouped in the wrong thread!!
Having used gmail forever, it’s amazing to see MS get it so wrong.
April 28th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
You must understand that when working with exchange 2010 conversation view works perfectly and as one would expect it. Unfortunately for all of you that run legacy exchange like 2003 or 2007 will have this bastardized version of conversation view. We have a few exchange 2010 deployments with exchange 2010 beta and are very pleased with the result.
May 17th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I have 2010 RTM installed, and Outlook definitely does not use the thread guid–just the subject line. I was very confused to see that a new email I just got with the subject “Thanks” already had a long thread behind it, with emails from two years ago grouped in. Annoying? Definitely. Deal breaker? Not yet…
May 31st, 2010 at 9:45 pm
The Final retail version doesnt seem to have any further improvement on this. I still see it incorrectly grouping only by subject line, which is horrible!
June 3rd, 2010 at 8:03 pm
I too have 2010 RTM and have been having various issues with conversation view. One of which is what is reported here.
The only thing, however, is that everyone is saying Outlook 2010 appears to be lumping messages together simply by subject alone, and it does appear to do that at times, but I don’t think it’s really doing that.
For example: I have a problem with emails with a particular subject being lumped together when in fact they are separate threads. I’ve attempted to “change” the subject of some of the emails in hopes of breaking them out of the thread, but they remain in the same thread, even with new subject. I’m really not liking this!
June 24th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
all i want to do is forward a complete conversation like i do in Outlook 2007 so my colleague can see all of the previous mails in one… i jsut cant find out how to do it in OWA 2010, its driving me MADDDDD
July 21st, 2010 at 8:29 pm
[...] failures in detail in his article “Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work” (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/19/why-outlook-2010s-conversation-view-doesnt-work/). Just like Gmail, Xobni and Outlook 2010 overlook the fact that sometimes in an email [...]
January 27th, 2011 at 9:33 am
January 2011: still the same pb in outlook.
I love Gmail!!!
March 21st, 2011 at 5:42 pm
Thanks for your post! You have exactly described what Microsoft should improve with next release! Actually I hope that there will be a bugfix as it is really a bug. But probably we have to pay for the next Office Version. But most important is that Microsoft will fix that problem anyway…
I have used “The Bat!” with Threading. This was great. Threading by Message ID is the only “real” Threading. Threading by subject… oh no you have described all the problems.
One more problem: Outlook 2010 cuts the “AW” or “Re” in front of the subject in the main view. So Outlook changed the subject for certain emails. And what does that mean for threading? Right, Outlook can’t recognize Threading for those manipulated emails!! Outlook stands in its own light!
Just because of the great calendar and the todo-list I have switched from The Bat to Outlook. I hope MS improves OL 2010 soon.
May 20th, 2011 at 8:02 am
2011 and still does not work.
microsoft fail
November 11th, 2011 at 10:21 am
seriously? this was flagged up 2 years ago, and when I come and search to see if there is just an option button I am missing I learn it is an inbuilt problem they haven’t bothered fixing in 2 years? wow.
December 9th, 2011 at 4:56 am
I have just been rolled into Office 2010 and have now gotte the GUID version of Conversations View. Does anyone know how Office 2010 can be changed back to the Headings identifier without rolling back to exchange 2003. I relied on this and hate the GUID version for “Telementry tracking”
December 9th, 2011 at 9:22 am
Nearly 2012 and still a ‘feature’. I wish I could use gmail for my work emails!