Use Gmail’s Smart Mute Feature To Handle Conversations Efficiently

If you remember, I had mentioned muting conversations as the first feature in my very popular killer Gmail features you might not know post. A number of commentators were delighted to discover this useful, and somewhat under-the-radar Gmail feature.

Now, while the “mute” feature has always been good at stopping distracting chain conversation threads from filling up your inbox, Gmail knew that it was there was a scope for improvement. Hence, sometime back, it introduced a Smart Mute feature via Gmail Labs (you are using some of the Gmail Labs add-ons, right? )

Once you enable this smart mute thing from your Gmails labs, you’ll find that only those conversations in a muted thread that have been specifically addressed to you or have mentioned you in the “To” or “Cc” fields will populate in your inbox. Previously, if you were one of the recipients along with many, then the muted conversation still showed up in your inbox. Now, it further prioritizes that process to make sure that you only see the conversation when you are meant to see it.

Another useful change, which Gmail made recently, was the unmuting process. You can now remove the mute tag from a message more easily than you could before.

As you see in the screenshots below, the Unmute option has been added to the More actions menu, as well as on the top of the message which has the mute tag (you can just hit the cross there and the message thread gets unmuted. )

Overall, the above changes would definitely help those who use the Mute option quite frequently to clear their inbox.