Automatically Ignore Entire Conversations in Gmail

Anyone who’s a part of a mailing list has been party to email threads that just went on way too long. If you use Gmail, did you know you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox:

By using the ‘m’ shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention.

The muted messages you never see remain marked as unread and you can still find them with standard Gmail search syntax. There’s even a special search syntax that returns muted messages only:

is:muted

If you later discover that some interesting talk has been going on behind your back, unmuting the conversation is as easy as selecting the conversation and choosing “Move to inbox” from the “More actions…” menu.

Now, what I really want to see is a way to mute conversations where my address is just on the cc line, for those many times when I’m copied on a message that never should have gone to me in the first place, or when friends or colleagues hijack a relevant message with off-topic chatter. Anyone have a hack for that?

(Via Mark Pilgrim)

Related:

• Google Hacks, 3E
• Greasemonkey Hacks