GMail cuts threads at 61 emails
I thought this was interesting... I don't seldom have emails that are this long, but since every survey submission is seen as part of the same resonse, I've been seeing it. It appears as though every 61 messages, the thread is cut and a new one is started. Has anyone else seen this and possibly experienced a different number? If everyone else is indeed seeing 61, does anyone know why?
Does anyone from Google read this? If so, why cut the threads at 61?
Side Note; Anyone know when Google Apps will be getting the 'Always use SSL' checkbox?
Categories: IT
I have been eagerly awaiting that same tickbox. I understand gmail gets the beta-quality changes, and apps gets the "stable" stuff, but one would think that is a feature that would be rolled out to the apps side pretty quick — especially considering their target.
Bill Gates: "640k should be more than enough for anybody…"
Matti Makkonen: "160 characters? that should be enough…"
Sergey Brin: "61 emails? "
technology FAIL.
I am totally seeing this exact behavior.
The software that monitors my server emails me when there is a problem and it emails me many times a day but they all go in one thread. I just noticed that every single day it emails me 61 times, which would imply that the problem with my server is something that happens exactly 61 times every day, which meant something that happened exactly every 59.02 minutes. Unfortunately it turns out to be nothing that interesting (or useful), it’s just the very specific number Google has chosen to be the maximum number of emails shown at once. In my case I think it’s just that I was getting a number of emails per day that was close to 61, so there happened to be exactly one cut-off thread of emails for each day recently.
Maybe Google did A/B testing with different values and used math to choose 61 as somehow superior.
I can’t help thinking it’s not as good as 100 in terms of guessability. If I saw a Gmail view where all threads had 100 emails I would think that Gmail was truncating them like they are. We live in a decimal world. When I see 61 it just seems like a natural occurrence, which is the opposite of what you want.