Google Tutor

Reading Gmail Threads in Stages with “Mark Unread from Here”

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 05:00 AM PST

When I work on a project with others I send a lot of mass emails to all collaborators. Aside from sharing documents in Google Docs, we still end up discussing a lot of the details by email. When the discussion gets heated, or someone sends a general call-out to everyone for bits and pieces of information, I end up getting around to reading the message thread after a few people have already responded. More than once, especially when traveling, I might only see the messages after there are too many emails to read in one go. Recently, Google announced a solution to what used to cause me a lot of extra work and frustration: Mark Unread From Here.

The “Unread From Here” function is new in labs, and let’s you indicate in a message thread at which message you want to start reading next time you open the thread. Basically, wherever you stop reading, you indicate that all following messages after this point are going to be considered unread until you get to them again.

How you use Mark as Unread From Here

In order for you to mark messages as unread from a certain point, you need to activate this function in Gmail labs:

Open up labs in Gmail.
Find the “Mark Unread From Here” function in the list
Select “Enable”
Scroll down the page, and save your changes.

Next time you receive a long thread of emails, and you need to refer back to them later, you can select mark unread from here from the drop down menu located in the top right corner of messages.

After you click “Mark unread from here”, the message from which you clicked and all others received afterward will be considered unread. The coolest part of this feature is yet to come: When you are taken back to your inbox you will notice something very cool to the message. Not only does it show up as unread mail, if you take a close look at the sender list, you will notice that the first few senders are not boldfaced (these messages are already read), but from the point where the thread is marked as unread the sender names are boldfaced.

To test this further, I went back into the thread and selected the last message to be marked as unread. When back in my inbox, only the last sender was now boldfaced.

When clicking on the message thread now, I am taken directly to the last email I had selected to remain as unread. This is definitely the coolest, and most useful, new development in Gmail labs I have seen in a little while. I can’t wait to put it to use and start saving time on long message threads! I also can’t wait to see what you think about this new labs feature in the comments!

Gmail problems or confused about Picasa? I’ll help you in the forums.

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