A growing number of businesses around the world have come to rely on Gmail as their main email platform. Simple to use, always up-to-date, and accessible from anywhere, it has a lot to offer users. Use it for a while and you will notice that messages and responses based on one message will be threaded together into one long message. Here is an overview of how this works in Gmail, and how you can change this behavior.

What is email threading?

When email was first created, email platforms treated each message that was sent or delivered as a separate message, even if it was a reply to a previous message. Over time, email became less about individual messages and more about conversations. Look at your emails and chances are that many individual emails are really about one core message or connected to one main conversation.

If you use Gmail, this conversation, based on an original message, is threaded together. This means that you have one conversation (the main email) with many messages going back and forth. Receive a new message and it is added to the conversation at the top of the thread. If you want to see older messages you simply scroll down the thread once it is open.

While this is a great way to display messages, in a compact way that cuts down on the number of emails in your Inbox, longer threads can become unruly, making it more difficult to actually find a specific message because it is in the midst of a thread. Beyond this, some users prefer to have non-threaded messages, with all messages listed separately.

How to unthread your emails

To unthread your emails simply:

1. Log into your Google account and open Gmail.
2. Press the cog in the top-right of the screen.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. Scroll down to Conversation View.
5. Tick Conversation view so that it is off.
6. Press Save Changes at the bottom of the screen.

What will happen when you do this

Once you press Save Changes you should be taken back to your inbox and you will notice a few changes. Firstly the number of emails in your Inbox will be higher, and secondly, messages that were threaded will now be added individually, based on when they arrived into your Inbox. If you are looking for these messages, you will need to either scroll through your Inbox or search for them using keywords and other search operators.

It should also be noted that when you reply to emails, a new message will be sent to both your sent folder and main Inbox, but the replies will not show up in the body of the message you replied to.

If you are looking to learn more about using Gmail in your office, contact us today to see how we can help employ the right tech tools to enhance your business efficiency.