Group e-mails like conversation

[rcubetrac]

Reported by rafaelfpviana1 on 29 Nov 2005 12:58 UTC as Trac ticket #1369135

It would be lice to group the e-mails like
conversation, just like gmail.

Keywords: gmail conversations group threaded Migrated-From: http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1369135

[rcubetrac]

Comment by Mikos on 12 Sep 2006 19:32 UTC

Please, add this feature. I want to switch to RoundCube, but because email conversations are missing, I must stay with GMail (and I also know other people for which conversation view is really important).

[rcubetrac]

Severity changed by Mikos on 12 Sep 2006 19:32 UTC

=> critical

[rcubetrac]

Comment by info on 18 Dec 2006 11:11 UTC

This is very important feature. It would allow RoundCube compete with Gmail. I could help with some coding, I really want this feature available.

[rcubetrac]

Keywords changed by info on 18 Dec 2006 11:11 UTC

gmail conversations group

[rcubetrac]

Comment by SteveE on 10 Jan 2007 17:24 UTC

This is also known "Group by Treads" or "Threaded View" It would be a great option to have that could be set in the Personal Settings

[rcubetrac]

Milestone changed by mtu on 22 Feb 2007 13:41 UTC

=> later

[rcubetrac]

Comment by eklitzke on 10 May 2007 07:13 UTC

Has any progress been made on this?

[rcubetrac]

Keywords changed by eklitzke on 10 May 2007 07:13 UTC

gmail conversations group

gmail conversations group threaded

[rcubetrac]

Comment by rogerpueyo on 19 May 2007 14:51 UTC

It would be very useful, surely.

SquirrelMail, Mutt, and other clients already have this feature, so maybe some code or some ideas could be grabbed from them.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by kraymer on 4 Dec 2007 13:17 UTC

Seconded. With several mailing lists in my inbox folder(s) I'd really appreciate this feature too.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by tensor on 7 Jan 2008 00:44 UTC

Another vote for this feature.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by epkphoto on 24 Feb 2008 06:06 UTC

I'll add my vote for this feature as well.

[rcubetrac]

Milestone changed by seansan on 23 Mar 2008 11:23 UTC

later => 0.4-beta

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 16 Jun 2008 13:47 UTC

Duplicate of #1424907

[rcubetrac]

Status changed by @alecpl on 16 Jun 2008 13:47 UTC

assigned => closed

[rcubetrac]

Milestone changed by @alecpl on 16 Jun 2008 13:47 UTC

0.4-beta => later

[rcubetrac]

Comment by zargon on 23 Jun 2009 20:32 UTC

Threaded view and conversation view are not the same. This is not a duplicate of 1424907. In threaded view, you must still open each message of a thread separately. In conversation view, all messages of a thread are displayed simultaneously.

[rcubetrac]

Status changed by zargon on 23 Jun 2009 20:32 UTC

closed => reopened

[rcubetrac]

Severity changed by zargon on 23 Jun 2009 20:32 UTC

critical => major

[rcubetrac]

Comment by bilbo on 7 Aug 2011 13:31 UTC

This would be really nice to have, there are not many mail clients or opensource webmails having the conversation view (the only one I can think of is development version of Thunderbird)

As roundcube already have some grouping into conversations, it should not be very hard:

Instead of showing [+] in threaded view, in conversation view it could show number of emails in the conversation (similarly to gmail) -> should be easy

The rest of the messages from that thread won't be shown.

Opening first message from the thread (actually, the only one visible) will then open entire conversation. As in gmail, messages that are read can be collapsed and unread messages can be initially shown. -> won't be so easy, but perhaps repeating the standard "message" component for every mail and putting it into collapsible div may do the trick.

Then once it is done there is some space for improvement - in gmail, you see list of senders, some of them in bold (unread) in the place of sender column, the date of conversation is date of last message in the thread, etc ... so perhaps adding some of these to roundcube may improve the usability of conversation view.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by abudden on 8 Nov 2011 15:11 UTC

Another vote for this feature. I use Roundcube on and off, but I think I would switch to it as the main email interface if it supported this. At the moment, I just get frustrated by the mess of emails in my inbox when compared to gmail's conversation view.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by poomerang on 29 Mar 2012 12:52 UTC

is there any chance of this being implemented at any point?

[rcubetrac]

Comment by cypriot on 16 Jun 2012 12:27 UTC

Please Please i am willing to donate 100$ for this feature , anybody out there please willing to donate Roundcube too...

And also the REad Receipt feature that Gmail now providing to business only it is marvelous idea and i am wwilling another 100$ for that too.

Please guys Please we need this Features urgently...

[rcubetrac]

Comment by codethief on 3 Jan 2013 18:31 UTC

Came here to bump this. :)

7 years already passed I wonder when this feature request will finally be considered important enough to implement it? There's a reason why GMail has become so popular. On the other hand, it's probably this feature (and the missing labels) that prevent many people from using RoundCube.

I would as well love to donate if someone implemented this.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by rroche on 18 Apr 2013 21:03 UTC

So I just registered to bump this.

Just installed Roundcube a few months ago, and this is the Number 1 feature request from my co-workers. Well that and shared calendars which it looks like I have to purchase from myroundcube.com, unfortunate but they need it, so it will be done.

Any ideas on where to start with this?

I am pretty familiar with PHP so I am going to go hunting, but a little push wouldn't hurt either.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by bugsbane on 1 May 2013 14:54 UTC

Every 6 momths or so for the last few years I come back and check if this is in Roudcube yet. What amazes me is that NO foss webmail has this feature, despite it being one of the most popular improvements that differentiates Gmail over everything FOSS has to offer.

I hate using local clients, but I've been using Thunderbird for years now, purely because of their Conversations plugin, which is perfect (except for being local, rather than a web app).

Anyway, I appreciate all of the work that everyone has done in Roundcube to make it the best FOSS webmail today, and I hope that will extend to conversation view without having to wait too many more years.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by mikegioia on 9 Jun 2013 14:40 UTC

I would love this feature, too. It may be the only thing holding me back from my eventual GMail migration.

I'm a PHP/JS dev and I think I'll have some substantial free time this summer. If anyone on this ticket is interested in getting the ball rolling, I'd love to open the convo again.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by rizzopablo on 9 Jun 2013 16:28 UTC

I pick up the gauntlet. Let's do it Mike!

[rcubetrac]

Comment by votacom on 9 Jun 2013 16:46 UTC

+1

Now that PRISM went public, i more than ever try to get rid off Google/ Gmail to migrate to my home server and provide Webmail service to me and my friends/family. Conversation view is truly the only feature I'm missing.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by Faldrian on 11 Sep 2013 20:55 UTC

I want to have a good replacement for GMail, but I have not found a webmail that does the workflow as good as GMail does. Roundcube looks awesome and needs the conversation-view, because it's crucial to fast and informed communication (Nobody uses fullquotes anymore to keep track of the conversation).

Please consider putting effort into building this view-mode.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by hroncok on 12 Sep 2013 02:01 UTC

Replying to mikegioia:

I would love this feature, too. It may be the only thing holding me back from my eventual GMail migration.

I'm a PHP/JS dev and I think I'll have some substantial free time this summer. If anyone on this ticket is interested in getting the ball rolling, I'd love to open the convo again.

So, how was the summer, did you get somewhere with this?

[rcubetrac]

Comment by rickvanderzwet on 3 Oct 2013 07:59 UTC

Enabling the feature to save your sent message in the same folder #1486759 and enabling the threaded view allows you to mimic the conversation view.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by stenyak on 7 Oct 2013 10:52 UTC

Yet another vote for this feature.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by piratepraveen on 26 Apr 2014 03:25 UTC

Time for comments and votes are long over, let's get this done. Roundcube is Free Software and we, users are in control, we don't have to wait for anybody. We can raise funds ourselves and get someone to work on it full time.

As a first step, can some one estimate how many hours of coding this feature would require?

Once we have that, we have to find someone to put in that much hours of work. We can pay market rate and raise the fund.

I have experience running crowdfunding campaigns, I was part of savepoddery.com campaign.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by RobR on 26 Apr 2014 05:02 UTC

My guess is this wouldn't take terribly long to implement.

We would need to add another option for 'Conversation View' on the bottom left of the Messages box (next to the List and Threads options) and then the conversation view would have to merge the e-mails together and organize them in reverse chronological order.

Basically it would be the Threads view but instead of an e-mail and all the replies under it, it would be merged into 'one e-mail' with the new replies on top of the old (possibly with the ability to collapse/uncollapse read replies).

There will probably need to be a database change so we can cache the e-mail filenames that belong together for better performance, so we don't have to keep looking them up, although the IMAP cache may already have the information we need for the most part.

Also the settings database would have to be updated to reflect this new option for sorting e-mails.

I am sure I am missing some stuff, but that is the gist of what would need to be done to get this accomplished.

My guess is less than 40 hours of dedicated programming for someone who knows the base code (which I don't).

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @thomascube on 28 Apr 2014 10:14 UTC

The crucial part is finding messages belonging to one conversion across folders. Although we now have multi-folder search capabilities in Roundcube core, it's still a sequential search through all IMAP folders which can be quite expensive. IMAP XCONVERSATIONS as suggested and implemented by Cyrus IMAP could be a nice approach to this.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 28 Apr 2014 10:47 UTC

The only difference between THREADS and XCONVERSATIONS is that the later is multi-folder feature. In that case, this feature request can be split into at least two sub-tasks:

1. Backend implementation of XCONVERSATIONS.
1.1. support servers with no XCONVERSATIONS capability.
2. Frontend implementation of conversation view.

All can be done separately. I think 2. does not depend on 1. and can be done on top of standard THREAD=REFS feature. However, 2. is still very complicated work as it changes messages list and preview behavior (and most of message actions like reply, show source, move, etc.).

[rcubetrac]

Comment by svnpenn on 16 Sep 2014 15:14 UTC

I would like to see this implemented as well!

[rcubetrac]

Comment by primexx on 8 Dec 2015 09:40 UTC

I'm looking into using Roundcube and this is a critical feature for me. I just stumbled upon this 9 year old feature request, and would like to add my vote.

It is currently listed on the front page as a planned feature, but there does not appear to be a definite timeline. Is this being worked on at all? If there is fund dedicated to the development of this feature, I would gladly contribute!

[alexis-]

This is an interesting feature. What kind of workload does it entail ?

[tkman26]

Very nice to have. I wonder how hard this would be? How easy is Roundcube to learn and modify? How willing will the community be to have this feature submitted by an unknown coder? I suspect if one starts to look at the code this is not trivial and that is why it has not been done.

[rizzopablo]

This is the most important feature in order to improve usability. All other major webmails, including hotmail/outlook have implemented this, even Thunderbird has the feature vía addons.

It's really strange rc still didn't have conversations after so many years.

[tasism]

+1

These days where every major client (web or not) supports this, not having it is a show-stopper for further adoption.

[sim6]

I think a cross folder conversation view is essential.

[HermesBote]

So when does it come this beloved feature? Waiting for it since long!!! Can someone give me an update? Or does enybody know an alternative which implements this feature?

[sattellite]

I think this thread is all the strength and all the weakness of open source. If you need it, do it yourself. But why? I can require implementation of it.

[alexanderdd]

Hello, I would like to increase priority & visibilty of this issue.

• Can somebody add the label "help wanted" here?
• In the milestone "later", this issue is at the very bottom. Can somebody move it to the top?
• Can somebody add "real conversation view" at the beginning of the description of the milestone "later"? At the moment, there are features that in my opinion have muuuch lower priority: "Future releases will include features like Mobile/responsive skin Save/link attachments in cloud storage services Admin interface for managing users and settings Keyboard shortcuts for common actions Advanced search over all folders ...and more"
• Maybe we can start collecting bounties for this? (How do roundcube devs propose to collect money?)

IMO, this is a must-have feature in 2019. I read in other forums that people stay with gmail etc because of the lack of open source webmail which has real conversation view (i.e. my own messages are part of the conversation view). Roundcube could beat rainloop and horde at this and be the first open-source webmail client with real conversation view.

@sattellite I think open source also means to decide together what the priority is, what the community needs. If I could code it I would have already started.

[Razva]

Just as a note, we're not adopting RoundCube because the lack of this feature.

[rizzopablo]

But ... most free projects which implemented conversations in the past... have died!

[MasterDimmy]

we still need it