Google recently launched the ability to disable the "Conversation" feature in Gmail. Mostly, this is a nod to people who just can't wrap their heads around it.
I enabled it briefly... very briefly... just to see if it would be a good solution for certain kinds of email messages I receive that don't work quite right with conversations (automated emails with identical subject lines collapsing together, needing to highlight a single message in the middle of a conversation as a To-Do, etc).
I still don't know if changing that setting would help those issues because of one major problem that was immediately exposed: Not every message necessarily has the same labels that the conversation as a whole does.
It's a weird concept, but it makes sense if you know how Gmail exposes its labels via IMAP. Let's say you have a conversation with 3 messages in it; a quick back-and-forth. You Move it to the appropriate label, both applying the label to the conversation (and, I would assume, each of the messages) and removing it from the Inbox. So far, so good.
Now, someone else responds to the message, pulling the conversation back to the inbox. Maybe there's several more messages before the conversation dies again. The label is already on the conversation, so you just Archive it.
Oops, all those new messages do not have the label attached to them unless you explicitly re-applied the label to the conversation.
When Gmail pulls up a conversation, it'll show you all the labels that all the individual messages have, but messages don't automatically have all the labels that the conversation does.
What that means... if you have a bunch of labels and have been using Conversations for a while, turning the feature off will probably leave you with a good number of messages that are suddenly unlabeled.
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