I am a big fan of Google’s Gmail.  It has lots to like.  First I like that it’s in the cloud.  I have my e-mail on any device from any place.  Light weight but full of features.  Sure the call tags labels but they work the same.  Labels work like Apple’s smart mailboxes.  I can label a message and it will appear under each label, but I only have one copy of the message.  I can aggregate all of my e-mail address into one inbox and with a couple of rules every thing is labeled and filed.

The thing I like best about Gmail turns out to also be my biggest source of frustration, e-mail threading.  Gmail will thread messages and responses together to give you a conversation.  This is great, the entire conversation is collected together both messages received and sent.  Only one flaw…the subject has to remain consistent.

If you are like me and most of the people you know are still stuck in the inefficient medium of e-mail for communication then you may notice that, for some reason, subjects begin to evolve over time.  Take this image of three different subjects for the same conversation from my inbox.

I auto label based on who I receive the messages from so the get one set of labels based on who I received it from and those labels will aggregate as a conversation grows.  But notice that these three messages are really the same conversation, but for some reason the subjects take on a life of their own.

It would be nice to have some way of merging conversations together within Gmail.  As far as I can tell, this just isn’t possible.  Google, add this to your list.