Conversation View: Comparing Gmail, Outlook, and Zimbra Desktop

While researching my latest Burton Group report, an overview of SaaS e-mail providers which will be published in September, I had the opportunity to explore the user interface differences between Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Zimbra Desktop. I found the different ways each of these products implemented "conversation view" to be fascinating.

If you aren't familiar with the concept, conversation view allows you to manage an entire conversation (or thread of messages) rather than individual messages. I find it invaluable. If you haven't seen conversation view before the screenshots below will give you a better idea of what it is.

Outlook, by default, organizes messages by who sent them. "Inbox" is for messages you receive and "Sent Items" is for messages you send. Or course, you can move these to different folders manually or with automated rules. However, after I started using Gmail (which only uses conversation view) I found Outlook's strict folder metaphor to be a hindrance, particularly when dealing with long e-mail threads that contain many messages. Outlook has an "Arrange by Conversation" view but, in my opinion, Gmail's and Zimbra Desktop's implementations are easier to use and are more useful.

To compare approaches used by these products I pointed Outlook 2007 and Zimbra Desktop at my Gmail mailbox using IMAP. I have been a Gmail user (for personal e-mail) for a couple of years and have built up a large amount of e-mail there. I also belong to a number of e-mail lists that are sorted with tags. Gmail's IMAP implementation translates these tags into IMAP folders. These IMAP folders provided a good test to compare the different approaches to conversation view.

What I found was:

1. Conversation view makes a big difference in tracking e-mail conversations. Instead of simply reading a message and then mentally piecing this back into context, conversation view retains that context. In my opinion, this is the way messages should be organized.
2. Although Outlook has an "Arrange by Conversation" view, it was only useful for a brief time while I was looking for something and then I quickly returned to the default sorting by date . Conversation view in Gmail and Zimbra is a natural part of the user interface (in Gmail you can't even turn conversation view off). If you use Outlook's "Arrange by Conversation" view as your default view then please tell us about it with a comment below.
3. Gmail and Zimbra Desktop does a good job using the "Subject" field in each of the messages involved in a conversation. The subjects of replies are extracted from the message itself and are not simply the subject line repeated. This extraction appears to be fairly intelligent and skips past previously quoted text to capture the first words the e-mail author wrote in that particular message. This provides additional assistance in recalling the context of the message you are reading.

I also thought it might be helpful to share screenshots of each of the products. For these screenshots I created a simple example of an e-mail message conversation with three users, each using a different e-mail product, and each contributing one message to the conversation.

Google Conversation View

The screenshot below is an example of Gmail's conversation view. This is showing the last reply in the e-mail conversation. By clicking on the senders in the earlier messages (collapsed above it) you can read the content of their messages too. This is the most unique method of the three that shows an entire conversation.

Zimbra Conversation View

This is an example of how Zimbra shows a conversation. This looks more like a traditional e-mail thread and uses a three pane interface (the left pane, with folder navigation is not shown). The conversations can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the little triangle shape on the far left column. The screenshot below is the conversation expanded. A collapsed conversation shows only a single line in the top pane.

Outlook Conversation View

Outlook couldn't easily display the thread in a conversation view. When using the default views I had to look in two places. Below is how it looked in my Inbox.

This is how it looked in my a "Sent Mail" folder (remember, I am using Gmail's IMAP, so this is why copies of the sent messages were not in "Sent Items"):

I find it striking how different the experience is when dealing with an e-mail conversation. These last two screenshots (above) show how Outlook's strict adherence to a folder metaphor tears the conversation apart and makes it difficult to follow. However, I had a pleasant surprise when I looked in the "All Mail" folder (this is a feature of Gmail and how it implements IMAP). This includes (like the name implies) all e-mail messages, regardless if they were received or sent. Outlook's "Arrange by Conversation" view worked:

Since Outlook's "Arrange by conversation" view only worked on a single folder the trick to taking full advantage of this is to get all of your messages (received and sent) into a single folder (or trick Outlook into thinking it is looking at a single folder). Here are some options for doing this:

1. Use rules to move sent and received e-mail to the same folder. Perhaps after reading a message you drag it to "Archive" and also store sent e-mail there. Gmail provides this view with the "All Mail" tag (which maps to the IMAP folder by the same name).
2. Use some Outlook wizardry with "Search Folders." These are virtual folders that use rules to find matching messages.

However, I still found Gmail's and Zimbra Desktop's conversation view more useful than Outlook's because of their innovative use of the subject. These two products inserted the first few words that each author wrote in to the subject rather than just repeating the same subject for each message.

Comments

[John Gormley]

Thanks for the article Larry.

I have been moving people to Gmail for a while, and a few of the Outlook using holdouts want to get connected with Outlook immediately after their account is setup. I usually find some reason for them to just use the Gmail web interface for a couple weeks until I can "configure their Outlook", and so far nobody has actually wanted to go back and use Outlook after seeing how Gmail handles conversations.