Conversation Grouping Improvements
As a user, I would like to see conversation grouping work more similarly to other mainstream mailing services like Outlook or Gmail by updating the functionality of conversations to:
- not include conversations that have been deleted
- only group emails that are replies from the original email (i.e., not grouping emails because they have the same title.)
The latter point can be frustrating when receiving emails such as appointment confirmations, newsletters, or sign-in pass codes which often have the same subject line.

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Ryan commented
For what it's worth, I cancelled my service with Proton because of this. It was a terrible experience and caused too much confusion. I migrated to Fastmail, and while it may not be as private/secure as Proton, at least their service does email threading correctly.
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Jason commented
I agree with Erich.
Conversational mode should be able to be applied at 3 levels:
1. Grouping as provided
2. Folder level - probably not a high demand
3. Conversation Threading - where user can select WHICH email conversation to thread.Threading is more important today when we all receive multiple emails from Banks, Stores, MHS/Gov, many wihich do not need to be linked. But others do.
Example:
Where a complaint has been raised with a service provider, and may involve many To/From emails.
I and others would wish these to be threaded, but the remaining "monthly bill/payment" emails not linkedI do accept that with the inbuild security of ProtonMail not everything can be provided. BUT! I feel this is critical for many.
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Steff commented
As others have requested, this needs to be updated to only group emails in the same conversation. Currently, every email that get submitted from my website’s contact page gets grouped together because they have the same auto-generated subject line. The group also contains every reply to each inquiries, and all of this entire history comes up every time there’s a new request submitted through my contact form. This is very messy, confusing, and has led to me missing emails because it looks like I’ve already responded or can’t tell a new inquiry was submitted. Please prioritize this change!
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Steff commented
As others have requested, this needs to be updated to only group emails in the same conversation. Currently, the grouping of every email that get submitted from my website’s contact page, and every reply to each inquiries, comes up in the same thread everytime there’s a new request. This is very messy, confusing, and has led to me missing emails because it looks like I’ve already responded. Please prioritize this change!
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Bernd commented
Hey Proton Team, I've had multiple awkward situations because your mail conversation grouping groups non-related mail conversations into one - I actually look at this as a bug, and not as a feature request.
Is there hope that this is going to be improved any time soon? It's almost 2 years that Katherine reported this.
How do you provide feedback? I haven't seen any feedback from a Proton team member in this issue.
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Steven commented
As the request says: Please only group replies from the original email and don't include items in the trash. Otherwise it becomes a somewhat random collection of unrelated emails.
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Anonymous commented
This really needs more attention
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Jade commented
This is so frustrating. I regularly enter the wrong OTPs because instead of the latest message in a group opening, a random message from the past opens first. Or making an online purchase and being confused by the total in the emailed receipt only to eventually realize I'm not looking at the latest message from that store. All around just a frustrating experience.
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Ryan commented
Please add your vote here as well, it has the most votes out of similar ideas: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/36982315-add-conversation-threads
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Ryan commented
This bugs me on a regular basis. I frequently get emails that have the same subject line that should not be threaded. Gmail and Outlook both implement this properly.
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Jason commented
And similar to other Email services can the conversational view stay threaded when mail moved to specific folder?
I use PM for NHS emails, which can be 2-3 weeks apart and for different "family" memners, so moved to "family member folder" once read.
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Bugs Bunny commented
I encountered the following situation: Person A writes me an E-mail. The conversation is grouped such that it shows all recipients that were ever included in previous mails as additional recipients as current recipients of the entire thread. I get confused why Person A included those additional recipients (even though the mail was directed only to me but was for some reason grouped with the mails that were to me and the other recipents).
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Filipe commented
https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html Please? It seems like (most of) the work has been done :)
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Kevin commented
It is unfortunate that the emails are grouped in a such hard to use way.
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Martin commented
The current conversions grouping is just broken. Why not use the `thread-index` in the email header to group actual conversations instead of fuzzy matching subject and pulling in seven year old unrelated emails or deleted emails into a conversation?
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BS commented
Conversation view enabled me to migrate from Gmail to Proton. I pay for it but it is still broken and not on-par.
I have emails by different people/organisations being grouped because they have the same short subject.
This likewise results in the carefully crafted labels that should be different, to show merged into one conversation.- and on the other hand -
I have multiple people reply to the same email thread, and they do not show up as one conversation.
This likewise results in each of those conversations being oncomplete.
This likewise results in each of those conversations not folding as expected, showing lots of duplicate information.Ofcourse I started looking for a "split from conversation" or "merge into conversation" button to fix the conversations/emails I selected. I was hoping to help Proton learn with bigdata eventually, and resolve my immediate problem, but this feature does not exist.
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B B commented
Would love this. With Gmail (which I am moving from) the archived emails with similar subjects or previous emails on the subject show up even if archived. If I archive it I'd love for it to not show up in the thread. Having some deeper search here would be beneficial.
I know this is older but I dont' think I've seen a fix or update here.
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G Harry Franklin commented
Could this not be a selectable option, so those who need it or want can and others have the option
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Drew commented
I very much agree. Messages having a common sender and subject is very common for things like order confirmations and invoices, but they are distinct messages and shouldn't be grouped together. However, I don't want to disable conversation group since it's a very valuable feature for actual conversations.
I'd hope that there is a way to group conversations using more unique values, perhaps in the message headers. At a minimum, have options to put an age limit on grouped conversations or allow the ability to exclude items in Trash from being grouped.
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Enrico commented
Yes please implement this. Current implementation of conversation grouping is pretty useless for me or even more an annoyance than helping with anything. Also let me allow to define if new messages should be on top or bottom.