Well, boohoo to the naysayers, but eve Microsoft are moving this way. Outlook 2007 comes with conversation view as an option (although it looks horrible), and it's the default view in Outlook 2010.
Personally, after using Gmail for a while, I just cannot go back to the old list style.
Most of the time it rocks! but every now and then I find that it is a huge issue. Sometimes I post an ad for labour in a local website, and all the replys come back as "reply to you ad" ... they all get bunched in to 1 conversation, and I can't separate them in to "people I want to talk to" and "plan b's".
[citation][nom]Rafff[/nom]I also find conversation view a natural one and cannot see any reason to get back to list view.One thing however I miss in conversation view is the ability to add mails manually to a conversation - this would be useful to me.[/citation]
And remove them too.
I'm really surprised to hear that there are people out there that hate it so much. Conversation view for emails seems like such an intuitive and convenient way to read them.
However, just because I can't understand why someone wouldn't want it doesn't mean they shouldn't have a choice, especially as someone that has wished for choices against some of the other "Features" Google has offered in the past (homepage fade in, anyone?). I'm happy to see Google taking a step in the right direction for everyone.
@Kevinnem
I'd never considered that drawback to conversation view. Nothing like that has ever affected me, but that certainly brings up good ideas for further improvements to the style.