How to stop OSX Mac Mail threading/grouping emails and conversations together

Grouped Conversations in Mac MailMac Mail has a feature now that groups emails with the same subject line together into a collapsed “forum thread” like manner, which saves space when you are looking at your inbox. The problem I find with it is that there just aren’t enough bells, whistles and foghorns to catch my attention when a new email arrives and its a reply to something in that thread. I need more than just the number in the bottom right corner incrementing. As a result, I have lost/not read some emails lately.

Thankfully, there is a solution for this, but it requires a bit of patience to implement as it is not a global fix. For some reason, emails are grouped by default, and you have to ungroup on a thread by thread basis…….Thanks Apple.

To do so, highlight the thread you want to ungroup, then in the menu bar select “View” and uncheck the option that says “Organise by Conversation”

Turn Off Email Grouping

Now you will see each email as a single item in your inbox again, and new and unread emails will go back to having that little blue dot to the left. If you want to continue to see threads from specific contacts in an ungrouped way, you can just ad a rule (in the rules tab in mail preferences pane) to highlight email from them with a unique background colour.

Ungrouped Email Conversations

Again, as I said, this isn’t global, its thread by thread. So if you REALLY hate this feature, a quick way to start making it go away is to select all messages in your inbox simulataneously (Highlight one, then click command and A) and then uncheck “Organise By Conversation”.

Change All Threads

If you are using Mac Mail as an RSS reader, this method also works to ungroup new posts on sites you are following.

If you have any other idea’s on how to work around this annoyance, please reply in the comments.

20 thoughts on “How to stop OSX Mac Mail threading/grouping emails and conversations together

  1. jorge landa says:

    I cant use mac mail for this reason. It sucks, we should not have our stuff sorted by default, but by choice. A screw up by apple. I just cant find my stuff properly this way.

  2. Sean says:

    Great – super useful thanks!

    The problem I was having is that multiple people would use the same subject line like ‘lunch’, and emails from all over the place would gets grouped together!

  3. Andi says:

    This faux pas on the part of Apple has cost me hours of productive time. Thank you for the fix, though I am wondering what other mail options are out there – and which are the best.

  4. Greg says:

    Andi, Thunderbird is a pretty good alternative to Mac Mail, and I have heard a lot of good things about Seamonkey from seamonkey-project.org. Its and All in one app, that has a news aggregator, email program, web browser etc, and from what I hear, it’s well worth looking at.

  5. Keith says:

    Unless I’m missing something you can do this globally by simply not selecting any message and deselecting Organise by Conversation

  6. Blair G says:

    Thanks, that works. Appreciate it!

  7. bicoz says:

    thank you! thank you!

  8. ktl says:

    Thanks for the work around. I am absolutely stunned at the stupidity of this function. I can’t tell you how much productivity I have lost–and how many messages I have missed–because they are part of a string that I am unaware of. I get too much mail to be able to work with this system. WHAT IS APPLE THINKING?!?!? It’s beyond my understanding why they think such a function would work for everyone. It is a disaster, and I now have to find a new email program–more time lost.

  9. ALBA TROSS says:

    Keith says:
    June 25, 2012 at 9:29 am

    Unless I’m missing something you can do this globally by simply not selecting any message and deselecting Organise by Conversation

    FINALLY SOMEONE WITH THE ANSWER!!! THANK YOU!

  10. Nathan says:

    Thanks! I “lost” several very important emails to this overzealous feature, and the problems this caused for me and the people who rely on me cannot be understated. It does one make angry.

  11. Karl says:

    Thank you very much, this has been bugging me for months, even when I though I’d tried everything! Clicking and unclicking “Organize by Conversation” under “View” does the job immediately, or toggles it back into threaded mode. Mac Mail is not a good program; I imagine someone has published software that adds to its functionality – any advice?
    Thanks.

  12. David Hunter says:

    WOW! is right. The suggestion just to go to “View” and deselect “Organize by Conversation” (without selecting any message) uncoupled everything immediately. I can’t wait to see if it will apply to new messages as they arrive. Even if it does not, I’ll just deselect it as my first step every time I open Mail. Hooray for Alba!

  13. Unfortunately, no matter how many times you uncheck the “Organise By Conversation” option in normal use, as soon as you select a different set of mailboxes in the left panel, it will go back to this option being checked/enabled. I only recently upgraded to Mountain Lion and I was sorry I did. I’ve had to uncheck that stupid option about 20 times a day at this point. I still have not found anyway of changing the *default behavior* of this.

    I only just today figured out the secret. If you have 5 mailboxes, and, for instance, either select the first 3 or the 4th one, and you’ve unchecked this option for both combinations, it will re-check/enable this stupid feature again every time you toggle to the other selection (from looking at the first 3 mailboxes together or looking at the 4th one by itself).

    If, however, you also go into JUST mailbox #5 by itself (selecting all and unchecking DOES NOT WORK), and uncheck it there as well, then you can finally view several other mailboxes with this feature not enabled. This is clearly a bug, and it is surprising I haven’t seen it being addressed anywhere–of course, it could be that there just are not a lot of people who have more than one or two mailboxes.

  14. Aaron says:

    Thanks Greg, Keith, and other commenters. Good to learn a solution for this bothersome behavior.

    Here’s some feedback I just sent Apple (via Mail’s ‘Provide Mail Feedback’ option):

    First, let me speak generally:

    As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a big percentage of the Mac-using population that is distressed by the direction Apple’s going in terms of caring about its users’ experience. I hope you’ll solicit feedback from your users and really think about the best way to improve their experience.

    Primarily this means more emphasis on allowing global preference changes to suit different (and differently-abled) users, and improved efficiency measures such as keyboard shortcuts (and customization thereof) and keyboard-based navigation instead of reliance on mouse or trackpad.

    More specifically, in Apple Mail:

    1. Please allow for keyboard-based navigation among panes. It would be intuitive for the right arrow key to lead one from the mailboxes pane to the message area. This does not work. See, for comparison, NetNewsWire, which does this beautifully: you can navigate everything using the keyboard, which suits some of us power users much more than mouse. Flexibility, that’s the key and what’s missing from Apple’s closed-box, top-down-dictate approach in recent years.

    2. A global preference for ‘organize by conversation’, rather than one having to guess that it’s mailbox-based. See:
    https://www.thewebernets.com/2011/11/09/how-to-stop-osx-mac-mail-threadinggrouping-emails-and-conversations-together/

    Thanks for listening and seriously considering this!

    Mac user since ’84,
    Aaron

  15. Nell Nelson says:

    Thanks to all who contributed to this. So relieved to find a way — ANY way — of stopping my mails grouping themselves. I’ve lost several vital emails since I bought my new iMac and was beginning to think I was going daft. I also freaked out at one point because I thought I had mistakenly shared a whole group into a private conversation (but it was just grouped in the same thread). I probably am going daft — but that’s another matter . . . This helps.

  16. Melissa says:

    Oh my gosh, thank you for this! It was driving me INSANE that suddenly, my emails were getting grouped. And I nearly missed a very important email response because of this. Thank you to this website for sharing what you know in how to resolve this. It’s disheartening what’s happening to Apple in so many ways. Seems like they are making more assumptions and customer service/tech support is nearly impossible…the time wasted in trying to resolve this is extremely frustrating. So thanks again for the insight. I will bookmark this site for future references.

  17. Simone Decosse says:

    I absolutely hate this feature. The grouping seems arbitrary – not necessarily in date order and just a major pain! I hope Apple will change this in the next upgrade or set up a global fix. But thanks for this information. I will try it.

  18. Brenda Nissen says:

    URGGGGGHHHH! I hate this feature so much! I have wasted so much valuable time searching for the original of the thread and have also gone into panic mode thinking that I sent out private personal or business conversations to entire groups in error. What were they thinking when this was created?

  19. Mark J. says:

    Oddly enough, I was bitten by the “View” -> “Organization by Conversation” out of the blue. I’m still using Catalina, and unexpectedly found my messages being organized this way with no action taken on my part. I turned the feature off (without any messages selected), and all was good until I exited Mail. (In other words, I had no conversation selected, and *all* of the conversations were ungrouped).

    The next time I used Mail, the feature was turned back on. I went through several rounds of turning it off, only to have it back on when I next started Mail. Finally, I selected all messages (Select All) and turned it off again. This time when I exited and restarted Mail it stayed off.

    I also had the “Show Side Preview” option spontaneously turn on twice in the last week or so, but it wasn’t as persistent as the “Organize by Conversation” option for some reason. I suspect that their must be something funny going on with the “saved state” files buried in the library, but it seems odd that one option would be more persistent than the other. No time to debug today though…

    Thanks to everyone who commented above since this led to my solving the problem (at least for now).

  20. Webmaster says:

    Hi Mark, glad you were able to sort out the issue!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.