Day 16: How to Mute an Email Thread
The mute button works just as well in email as it does on TV.
To: Non-Politics Related Mailing List
From: Political Junkie
Subject: REPUBLICANS ARE EVIL
They're just so evil!!! Gingrich wrote a book about morality right after he asked his second wife for an open relationship. Mitt Romney destroyed 80,000 jobs at Bain. And Herman Cain once delivered me a burned pizza. PURE EVIL!
Re: REPUBLICANS ARE EVIL
Democrats are TWICE AS evil!!!
Re: Fwd: REPUBLICANS ARE EVIL
Republicans are 40% more likely to have a Hitler moustache, therefore they must be evil!!!
Re: Fwd: Re: REPUBLICANS ARE EVIL
OMG SINCE AL GORE INVENTED THE INTERNET, HE MUST BE RESPONSIBLE FOR SOPA. WHO'S EVIL NOW, SWEETCAKES??
Sound familiar? Sometimes, a perfectly good mailing list just goes to the dogs (or gets taken over by pictures of cats), and 300 messages later, it's still not over. Sometimes you give up and leave the list; sometimes you just press the delete button 300 separate times. Today, we're going to learn about a better way - the mute button.
Most modern mail clients provide the ability to mute a conversation. Much like pressing the mute button on your TV, muting a conversation means that none of the rest of the messages from that thread will end up in your Inbox. Instead, they'll go straight to your Archive folder, without requiring any further attention from you. In this specific case, it’s faster than removing yourself from the mailing list completely, and better too, because when the discussion peters out, you’ll still be on the list in case something interesting comes up later.
Mute is useful for more than just filtering political discussions. More broadly, the ability to mute a conversation means that once an email chain takes a detour into something that isn't relevant for you, you can stop spending time thinking about it.
To do: Estimated Time: 10 min
1. Familiarize yourself with how to mute conversations in your mail client.
Gmail provides this functionality out-of-the-box, without needing to create a custom filter. To do this, just click 'Mute' in the 'More actions' drop-down menu, or press the “M” key while the thread is selected or opened if you've enabled keyboard shortcuts. Once you mute a thread, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox. But if your email address is explicitly included in the to or cc field of a new reply, the conversation will pop back into your inbox to grab your attention. Muted messages are not marked as read, are still searchable, and can specifically be found by searching for: "is:muted"
Outlook 2010 also includes the ability to mute threads. Just right-click a message in the thread, choose the “Move” menu, and choose the “Always Move Messages in this Conversation” option to move all messages from the conversation to a specific folder, automatically. If the conversation is utterly without value, you can also choose "Ignore Conversation" from the right-click menu instead, which will move any further replies to the Trash.
Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 and 2003 don't provide a mute feature. So muting a conversation in Outlook 2007/2003 will need about 30 seconds. Fortunately, since most out-of-control threads reach your Inbox through a mailing list, you can use the presence of that list in the headers to quiet things down. The best thing to do is to create a rule that will move all messages sent to the mailing list, for a specific amount of time, into an archive folder or the Trash.
- Click the “Tools” menu
- Click “Rules and Alerts.”
- Click the “New Rule” button
- Choose the option to “Move messages sent to a distribution list to a folder.”
- Click the “people or distribution list” hyperlink in the pane at the bottom, and type in the email address for the mailing list
- Click the “folder” hyperlink, and pick your folder.
- Click Next, scroll down to pick the “received in a specific date ” box, and click the hyperlink to set the date range.
- Set the range to be from now until a week from now.
In Apple Mail, you're out of luck for a built-in feature. You should be able to follow a similar set of steps as Outlook 2003/2007 to quiet things down, by creating a rule to filter all messages from a mailing list, then deleting it once the thread has gone away.
Share today's info:
Final Thoughts
| Muting isn't just for TV! Learn to use your email client's mute feature to mute emails | Tweet |
| Large mailing lists will generate 50+ message threads. Mute them if they're not relevant | Tweet |
| If an email thread gets out of control, mute that thread rather than leaving a good mailing list | Tweet |
Today, we talked about muting threads, which is really a specific use case for filters - filtering a conversation that you're not interested in. Tomorrow, we'll talk about filters more broadly, and discuss how these powerful tools can keep messages from requiring any of your attention.