Have you ever subscribed to a mailing list or commented on a website/blog and check-marked ‘Notify me of follow up comments’ and are now fed up with the thread that always shows up as ‘Unread’? It becomes more irritating when you find the updated conversation has nothing to do with you. But you still want to continue subscribing it because you hope something might just interest you in future. If you are using Gmail, there are two ways to spare yourself the annoyance.

Method #1 – Using ‘mute’ feature

If you find a mailing list conversation irrelevant, you just need to ‘mute’ it and all the future conversations will stay out of your inbox. To mute a conversation, simply select it and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Mute’.

However, muted conversations are simply ‘off’ your inbox and not ‘Read’ mails. They will remain as ‘Unread’ mails and you can search for muted conversations by typing ‘is:muted‘ in the search box.

To unmute the conversation, select the muted conversation and click ‘Move to inbox’.

Method #2 – Using Filters

You can manage such friendly spam with ‘Filters’ too. This will require you to have a bit of common sense.

1) First, select the conversation and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Filter messages like these’.

2) The ‘Filter options’ panel will be displayed on top. By default, the email address of the sender is already entered in the ‘From’ field. You can tweak the filter by using a ‘unique’ word from the subject line of the conversation and entering it into the ‘Subject’ field. Click ‘Next step»’ button.

3) Now, checkmark ‘Mark as read’ and ‘Also apply filter to xx conversations below’ options and click ‘Create filter’.

Once you make a filter, all the future additions to the conversations won’t light up as ‘Unread’ mail. It will still remain in your inbox but will less annoy you.

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