Great News! You Can Mute Gmail Threads

Your saving grace when someone overuses the "Reply All" function.
Image may contain Pattern
Google

Somehow, you’ve found yourself 10 emails deep on a Gmail thread that’s seemingly never going to never end. Someone hit Reply All just to say OK. Another person chimes in to say Mike was left off the original thread, so they're adding him now. Mike replies to say hi; someone else replies to say hi back. Every two seconds, there's a new email, and you're reaching your breaking point.

But you can’t email the chain’s progenitor and asked to be removed. You weren’t born in a barn. Fortunately, there’s another, more socially appropriate (read: passive-aggressive) solution in your inbox’s toolkit: the Mute button.

Gmail has one, and it’s magic. It took me awhile (... more than a decade) to find it. But boy, am I glad I did. Everyone should know where it is and how to use it, so in the spirit of generosity, here's how.

How to Mute

Open Gmail, select the offending email chain, and click More in the menu bar at the top of the screen. There you'll find options to mark the chain as unread, mark it as important, or mute. Hit the Mute button and you're done.

From the Gmail app, use the three dots in the top right corner to pull up the same menu, with the same Mute button.

Google will automatically archive all existing and incoming messages in the thread—meaning they'll remain deep in the filing cabinet of the company’s brains but won’t show up in your inbox. You won't get notifications for new messages either. Should you want to unmute the conversation in the future, just type a name or keyword into the search box, highlight the thread, navigate to More, and click Unmute.

That’s it. For real. You can thank me later, but please don’t send an email.