Tech for Luddites

People are very passionate about their email, especially when it isn’t working right. This became very apparent after iPhone users recently upgraded to iOS 10.

Even celebrities aren’t immune to tech frustration. Just ask Today Show anchor Hoda Kotb:

The reason for all the angst is that Apple added new options to their email settings that determine whether and how your messages are threaded. Now normally I’m all in favour of offering users more ways of doing things. The problem here is that Apple chose default options that changed the way messages show up in your Inbox from before the upgrade, with a “bonus” feature of making the messages themselves scroll forever. In other words:

The good news is there’s a super-easy fix!

Go to Settings > Mail > Threading. There are three different settings (Organize by Thread, Most Recent Message on Top, Complete Threads) that are turned on by default. Simply turn off the ones you don’t want.

Note: I find it difficult to articulate how each of those settings work, especially as you change the other ones. For the screenshots below, the top one shows what a series of emails and replies looks like when all three options are turned on; the bottom one shows the same emails and replies when all three options are turned off. Your best bet is to experiment with all of them to see which combination works best for you.

All Options On

All Options Off

Thanks to T4L reader Orla who shared this fix in a comment on a related post about email threading in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and iOS:

Stop the Email Threading Madness

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