What is an e-mail 'thread'?

What is an e-mail 'thread'?

Tim Burress (E-mail Etiquette and Organization Specialist) gives expert video advice on: What is a 'hyperlink'? and more...

An e-mail thread is a particular segment of a long conversation. Thus email can be seen as a synchroniser. I send an e-mail to you, you send an e-mail back to me and thus the ping-pong is back and forth. The more people you have on it, the more e-mail pieces or segments. Each one of those segments is called a thread. And so if an e-mail goes over a long period of time, over a large distribution list, it can have a lot of individual e-mail threads to that particular e-mail communication.