I’m probably not the only one that is subscribed to a lot of mailing lists or has a really long conversations which span trough some 10s of messages. To ease the navigation between messages in the same thread I decided to move part of the thread closer to the message I’m currently reading. Starting with today’s builds there is a Message threads pane displayed at the bottom of message view pane.

This is how it works: After the message is loaded the following messages from the same thread are shown:

1. parent message
2. message being read message (will be colored differently)
3. messages on the same level as message being read
4. messages one level lower (deeper into the conversation) as message being read

Update 10.01.2010: The implementation in today’s development version actually works, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges.