Apollinaris Schöll writes:
yes, yes, yes full ack. Thats what I am doing. But its extremely hard to convince users to change what they have done for a long time.
Yes, I sympathize with you.
However, if that's an option, most email clients provide a way to "burst" the digest into individual messages, which will then be threaded in the normal way for that client. This provides the user with the "download all the recent messages periodically" benefits of the digest, as well as the threading capability of the client.
Can you list clients that can do that? I’d like to have options to recommend if users insist on digest.
Not offhand. Besides Emacs-based clients (which all can do it, but I doubt you're going to be recommending those ;-), the ones I'm familiar with are the text-based ones like mutt and mh, and open-source implementations like Thunderbird (burst requires an add-on). Gmail does *not* seem to handle bursting, although Google Groups provides digests. Outlook 2011 had a "burst" filter that automatically burst all incoming digests, not sure if you could do it on-demand at mail reading time, and I don't know about Outlook365. There doesn't seem to be a built-in feature for handling digests in Apple Mail, but there are plug-ins.