There’s at least one of those people in every office.  People that, no matter how much of a benefit there is to learning a new way to do things, insist on staying in the old way.

For people migrating to Gmail from other mail services like Lotus, Exchange or other web mails like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, threaded conversations can be a problem, making the old way look better.  Until now, Google has only let you have threaded e-mails.

Consumer e-mail users who hate the threads have stayed put on their other services.  Corporate users often use desktop e-mail clients to avoid the threading.  For those important enough to influence mail system choices, threaded e-mail may have even cost Google some Apps deployments.

Today, in a post on the Gmail blog, Google announced that threaded conversations were now optional:

…  some of you have been very vocal about your dislike of conversation threading. So just like you can order your baja fish tacos without cilantro, you can now get Gmail served up sans conversation view. Go to the main Settings page, look for the “Conversation View” section, select the option to turn it off, and save changes. If you change your mind, you can always go back.

The new feature will be rolling out over the next several days so not all users will see the option immediately.  Enterprise users will need to have their administrators enable the option.