I was digging through some old tickets recently, and lamenting the difficulty of crawling through pages and pages of search results because for some reason, responses to TASK tickets don't thread in Gmail. This isn't necessarily a TASK-specific thing: we also used Footprints for our IS departments ticketing system for a while, and I had the same problem there.
I'm not entirely sure why it happens: there must be something in the metadata of the email that causes it to happen. Typically two or three emails (e.g. an email from TASK and my direct reply to it will be in one thread, and then the TASK-sent copy of my reply and the first response from Tessitura will be in a second thread thread) will stick in a thread, and then the next will start a new thread. For a complex issue (aren't they all) I'll have a list of 10 or 20 threads, all responses to the same ticket.
Has anyone figured out why this happens, or better yet, a way to stop it?
I have the same gripe. My solution was going to be to keep a Trello card for each ticket or enhancement request internally. Trello can give you a unique email address for each card, so I was going to just add this email as a permanent CC when creating the ticket in TASK.
Unfortunately, Trello's card emails contain a + sign, and although this is a valid character in email addresses, TASK doesn't know this and instead uses it as a delimiter. The first time I tried this it unfortunately caused an infinite email loop between TASK and Trello bounce notifications (since TASK was mangling the address). This would have to be fixed by Footprints upstream.
For a while I was creating a Gmail label for every individual ticket as a way to keep all of the messages "threaded", but sometime in the past year my email discipline declined into "Inbox ∞", so that's not happening anymore. Theoretically could be possible to automate this with a Google Apps Script, but I'm in no position to investigate that tech any time soon.
My solution to labeling is to apply two labels to all incoming TASK emails: "TASK" and "TASK Active". Then I regularly pull up the "TASK Active" emails and remove that label on all but the most recent thread for any ticket, and once the ticket is closed then I remove it from the last thread as well.
*Update*
It occurs to me that a third label "TASK Complete", which I would apply manually to a closed ticket would be a good filter for doing research against old tickets, since the last email on the ticket should have the full thread in it.
After trawling through 10^1000000 articles on "I Hate Gmail Conversations, Here's How You Turn Them Off!!!!11one Outlook 4ever!", I finally found something that might be relevant:
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/965/how-does-gmail-decide-to-thread-email-messages
The following conditions must be met:
I'm guessing Footprints is failing on both of #2: your reply is resent, but by Footprints (without your email address), and I don't remember seeing that header.