As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of threading in emails. That’s mainly because it’s not that useful for the type of emails I deal with but I’m aware that most people have different workflows and probably do like threading. For those people who also use mu4e, Ambrevar has an excellent solution to some of the problems with threading.
Although it’s still in early development, Ambrevar has released his package, mu4e-conversation, to Melpa. The idea is to show all the messages in a thread together in a single buffer. That makes for a more natural reading of the thread and it’s possible to assign colors to each participant in the thread to further aid in understanding who’s saying what.
There’s also a tree-view, which presents the thread as an Org mode tree with each message a node in the tree. Since you can operate on the tree in the usual Org mode ways, that provides a powerful tool for dealing with the thread. It’s easy to switch between the linear and tree views so you don’t have to choose one but can use whichever’s most convenient at the time. You can see screen shots of both methods at the package’s GitLab repository.
Ambrevar shows you how to configure mu4e to always use mu4e-conversation but you don’t have to do that. You can install it and then call it when you want it from the mu4e headers view.
This seems like a really useful package and I’m tempted to try it out for the few times that I want a thread-view of my messages.