About email threading

A typical email conversation includes messages, replies, forwards, and attachments, which are all added to the application as separate documents. The email threading feature analyzes the contents of these documents and organizes them together into threads.

Email threading allows you to reduce the number of documents to review by separating unique content from content that is duplicated across multiple email messages. Depending on your review strategy, you can omit duplicate email messages and review only the unique messages in a thread.

Reviewing documents in threads can also make it easier to understand the relationships between senders and recipients in a thread, or to determine whether documents may be missing from a thread.

You can perform document review using threaded view features, in addition to standard review features. For more information about threaded view features, see Threaded document information on the Documents page.

Email threading concepts

The application determines thread document types during thread analysis. After documents have threaded types, the application builds threads.

The following table describes how the application assigns thread document types to documents.

Thread document type	Criteria
Pivot	A document is a pivot if it meets any of the following criteria: The document is the latest document in the thread that contains all content of the thread’s preceding documents. The document contains recipients that are not in the thread’s next document. The document contains attachments that are not in the thread’s next document. The document cannot be thread analyzed.
Duplicate	A document is a duplicate if it meets any of the following criteria: The document is an exact copy of another document at the same level in the thread. The document contains content that is contained in the thread’s subsequent documents.
Duplicate previous pivot	A document becomes a duplicate previous pivot when a new document that becomes a pivot is added to the thread. The content of the duplicate previous pivot document is now contained in the new pivot document. Because the document is no longer a pivot, it is now considered a duplicate.

For information about an example email threading scenario that illustrates how documents are formed into threads, see Email threading example.

Process overview

The typical email threading workflow includes the following steps:

Submit documents for thread analysis: You perform a search for documents, and then submit the documents to be processed into threads. For information about how to submit documents for thread analysis, see Submit documents for thread analysis.

The application performs thread analysis: The application analyzes the submitted documents and builds threads.

Access threaded documents: You can access threaded documents in the following ways:

Search for threaded documents. For information about how to search for threaded documents, see Search for threaded documents.

Open threading assignments. For information about how to open assignments, see Get your assignments.

Note: To open an assignment in threaded view, you must select the Threading option in your search preferences. Administrators and group leaders can create assignments that contain threaded documents.

Optionally, identify problems with analyzed documents. For more information, see Troubleshoot documents submitted for thread analysis.

Review threaded documents: In the List pane, you can use threading-specific icons, buttons, and other screen elements to review threaded documents. For information about how to review threaded documents, see Review threaded documents.

The permissions set by your administrator determine access to this feature.