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29 Jan

Get rid of irrelevant conversation threads


Datum: 2025-01-29 09:10
A person is holding a smartphone displaying an email notification with 12 unread messages, while a laptop is open on a wooden desk in the background, illuminated by warm sunlight.

Some email con­ver­sa­tions are real­ly valu­able, while oth­ers lose their val­ue after a while. It start­ed off fine with a few col­leagues email­ing amongst your­selves about some­thing you are all involved in at the moment. But now the con­ver­sa­tion has evolved and the thread keeps trail­ing on and on. 


For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the Done!” pod­cast:


Decreas­ing benefit

After a while, the asyn­chro­nous dig­i­tal con­ver­sa­tion devel­ops in a direc­tion that is no longer rel­e­vant for you. The incom­ing emails part of the thread con­tain less and less infor­ma­tion that involves your area of respon­si­bil­i­ty and are, quite frankly, just in the way.

You ask the oth­ers to remove your email address from the thread but not every­one seems to have under­stood your request or know how to ful­fill it, so the irrel­e­vant emails keep on coming.

There is, how­ev­er, a way out. With the press of a but­ton, you can avoid fur­ther involve­ment in this now irrel­e­vant thread.

Do this

In three of the most com­mon email­ing clients you can move the entire thread to either the archive or the bin with just a few clicks, and then have any incom­ing emails relat­ed to the thread stowed away in the same loca­tion, which means you will nev­er even see them in your inbox.

This is done a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on what client you use.

  • If you use Out­look you sim­ply click Ignore” in the group Remove” in the tab Start”. Do a search for Ignore all email mes­sages in a con­ver­sa­tion” and you will find a more detailed description.
  • In Gmail, you click the three dots labeled More” at the top of the email and then click Ignore”. Search for Archive or mute Gmail mes­sages” and you will find instruc­tions on how it is done.
  • If you use Mail in macOS you can, if you have the ver­sion called Catali­na (10.15) or a more recent ver­sion, click a sym­bol of a bell and there­by mute bor­ing or irrel­e­vant con­ver­sa­tions. You will find a descrip­tion of exact­ly how to man­age it if you search for Mute email con­ver­sa­tions in Mail on Mac”.

Few­er emails over­all and few­er irrel­e­vant ones at that

If you ignore or mute con­ver­sa­tion threads you no longer want to be a part of, you will not get as many emails in your inbox as you are right now. The emails you do get will be of the kind you are actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in and you will not have to spend unnec­es­sary time pro­cess­ing emails that are of no val­ue to you.

What’s your way?

Have you solved this annoy­ing but very com­mon prob­lem in some oth­er way, with­out using any of the fea­tures I have just described? If so, feel free to email me. Maybe you’ll solve more than one per­son­’s dilem­ma by doing so.

(By the way, do you know these nine ways to reduce the inflow of e‑mails?)


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