Help with GMail's handling of SL?

In the recent discussions of hotmail messing up the IM-forwarding, it's been recommended to switch to GMail. This seems to have taken care of the problem of the missing IMs, but now I have a new problem:

All the damned IMs are clumped together! The rental box payments are all buried in a huge clumping of every other type of notice I get. None of the GMail users I've talked to know how to stop this godawful thing -- they seem to think it's useful, and don't understand why I can't stand it.

So surely you SL GMail users understand why this is a problem? Do any of you know how to fix it?

If I can't stop it, I'll have to switch to something else. Does anyone recommend an email service that works well with SL?

Thank you!
-Avion

It's a feature.

It allows you to keep all related emails together, such as when you reply back and forth several times with someone, rather than having a separate entry for each. I've never found it a problem with SL, although you probably get far more offlines than I do. I've never actually looked into whether there's a way to shut it off.

I see things like this also, gMail seems to lump a lot of messages from SL together. It is not a big problem for me. I previously used Yahoo email, its free, but does not have the search capability of gMail, or it didn't used to.

Give it a chance - it might grow on you.

I ran into the same issue using the web client. All of my sales from particular vendors get clumped together. I since started using external client software (primarily my iPod Touch) and a desktop alternative (Outlook Express) for final offline archival storage (in POP mode).

I thought it would too, Love. I thought it was just my fear of change, and my typical resistance to anything out of my comfort zone.

But now I see, even if I delete one of these "clumps," all the new messages it associates with them get relinked with the deleted ones! This is truly a disaster. I know it's free, and I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but wow this is really terrible and unusable. I honestly don't see how an SL business-owner could use it!

if you find a way, PLEASE let me know.

gmail is rather "random" about which "message from Secondlife" emails get stuck together.

Are you saying that it's associating IM's from different customers into one conversation? It doesn't do that for me... In fact, it tends to break conversations up too much for my liking.

If you access your gmail account via pop or imap, you won't see the associations. If you really want a web front end, then I guess you'll have to try something else.

I've searched all over the options and preferences on gmail and could not find a way to disable the message grouping. I really don't care for the grouping and thought also that it would grow on me and I would prefer it; It's been months and it hasn't grown. If you do find a way to disable it, please share!

I you think using an email client would help I'll say I like Thunderbird .

It seems to be differentiating the friends, customers, etc. okay. But it is lumping all the automated notifications together. When hotmail used to work, I could quickly go through and read and delete them as I got them. So now, it treats a rental payment exacly the same as a traffic-bot notification or a "your shark swam off world." It clumps or disassociates them totally randomly and unpredictable, as Winter says. And when you delete a clump, it later resurrects it from the dead to clump new messages with it.

This does need to be web-based so that I can check it on my breaks at RL work without installing any new software.

OK, well, you can create some labels. Create one for IM's from customers, one for shark notifications, one for rental box messages, etc etc. Then you create filters to label each message as it comes in based off of rules. You can even have it remove the message from the "inbox" (which is nothing more than a label in gmail). You then click the appropriate label links (down the left side) to see all the messages of a particular type.

Honestly, I'm not sure if that will "break" the conversation associations, so you might still see your message in a longer conversation, but you might try a test to see.

If that doesn't work for you, I think you're out of options in gmail, to be honest.

Good luck!

I wish mine would do that... the last time my GMail associated new messages with deleted ones, it threw the new ones in the trash unread!

** I just reread the above para, and I don't think it was very clear. I had deleted the messages, they were in my trash folder, and the incoming ones got added to the conversation in the trash.

I like GMail's message sorting better than I thought I would, and I even like *some* conversations being clumped together, but I wish it would give me the choice to separate them, or to delete some and not others in the same thread.

Love, my experience has been that even with different labels, anything GMail thinks is a conversation will get lumped together.

I belong to several related RL lists, and it's typical to find duplicate messages sent to different groups lumped together with all the labels in front of the single "conversation" - even when I filter by label.

Ah well.

I deleted the gmail account.

I'm trying Yahoo mail, and it seems to be doing pretty well so far. It's spammy; flashing you an ad every time you do something, but I figure it's like TV; the commercials pay the bills. And it's a little aggressive about sending things to the spam folder, but I don't seem to be missing any IMs. At this point I'd recommend it to those let down by Hotmail, and frustrated by Gmail.