A system for providing a gathered threads view of email messages that effectively indicates the presence of messages from important persons and/or from new participants in the thread. When a message in a thread is received, the sender of the message is compared to a list of important persons for the receiving user. If the message is from a person that is important to the receiving user, then an indication of that message is presented in the user interface with a higher display precedence than indications of messages in the thread from users that are not important. The sender of a received message in a thread may also be compared with the senders of previous messages in the thread and the recipients of the first message in the thread. If the sender of the received message is a person that has not previously been a sender of a previous message in the thread, then that message is considered to be from a new participant in the thread, and an indication of the received message is presented in the user interface with a higher display precedence than indications of messages in the thread sent from persons that had previously been senders. The system may display indications of all messages in a thread received from important persons are displayed at a higher precedence than indications of messages from new thread participants, which are in turn displayed at a higher precedence than indications of all other messages in the thread.