Prevent Gmail Threaded Conversation on Notification emails

Question

This question is the opposite of Header in gmail for thread hinting

I have a system that generates notifications for various things. A lot of these have the same subject line, but different content.

Is there anyway short of adding some kind of unique token in the subject line of forcing the emails to NOT be in the same thread, i.e. show up individually. Changing headers and/or content would be acceptable, but changing the subject line will scare people. Also, not all of the recipients are Google Apps/@gmail.com accounts so I can't use things like "+hash".

If it matters, the application is written in C# and ASP.Net.

Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

Google seems to weigh the subject line pretty heavily in their threading heuristic, so there doesn't appear to be much that you, as a sender, can do about it without unique-ifing the subject lines somehow.

Adding a timestamp to the subject line seems to defeat the threading -- do you think you could get your users to buy into that?

On the recipient's side, they could use the IMAP interface to bypass gmail's threading. And I hear Google is open to giving users the option to disable the "conversations" feature -- it's obvious that there are a lot of people out there who hate it!

Answer 2

You may be in luck now, check out this article - https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-changes-in-gmail-conversation-view.html - because of the new requirement to have the mail header reference a previous email message ID, your system generated emails are probably no longer threading if your situation is like mine. Good for you, but that wasn't what I wanted for my use case! Enjoy.