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This question is the opposite of Header in gmail for thread hinting

I have a system that generates notifications for various things. A lot of these have the same subject line, but different content.

Is there anyway short of adding some kind of unique token in the subject line of forcing the emails to NOT be in the same thread, i.e. show up individually. Changing headers and/or content would be acceptable, but changing the subject line will scare people. Also, not all of the recipients are Google Apps/@gmail.com accounts so I can't use things like "+hash".

If it matters, the application is written in C# and ASP.Net.

Anyone know how to do this?

Community
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Jared
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  • (Just an observation, not exactly answer.) Square brackets made the difference for me. Example: *[hostname | yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss] text* ... emails are grouped to the same thread unless different text *hostname | yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss text* ... emails are NOT grouped. – user313829 Nov 21 '18 at 00:22

2 Answers2

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Google seems to weigh the subject line pretty heavily in their threading heuristic, so there doesn't appear to be much that you, as a sender, can do about it without unique-ifing the subject lines somehow.

Adding a timestamp to the subject line seems to defeat the threading -- do you think you could get your users to buy into that?

On the recipient's side, they could use the IMAP interface to bypass gmail's threading. And I hear Google is open to giving users the option to disable the "conversations" feature -- it's obvious that there are a lot of people out there who hate it!

Jim Lewis
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  • Adding the timestamp is an idea. I don't think that would be too "scary". If we don't get a better idea, I'll go with this. – Jared Sep 01 '10 at 18:46
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    This answer says there are other methods: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25435722/535229 – Jannes Jan 30 '15 at 16:46
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    @Jared , one more trick would be add in Subject: `Received in " +DateTime.Now.Second+"Seconds"`. It may help. – Shaiju T Mar 03 '16 at 08:27
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You may be in luck now, check out this article - https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-changes-in-gmail-conversation-view.html - because of the new requirement to have the mail header reference a previous email message ID, your system generated emails are probably no longer threading if your situation is like mine. Good for you, but that wasn't what I wanted for my use case! Enjoy.

KBr
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  • A year later this doesn't seem to be the case. Disparate e-mails with the same sender, recipient, and subject are still grouping, even without explicit reference ID. – Rikaelus Apr 23 '20 at 00:25