Understanding the distinction between message ID and thread ID in Gmail

NOTE:
To learn how to obtain a thread ID, click on How to get thread ID of a Gmail thread.
For accessing the message ID, click on How to get message ID in Gmail.

Difference between Message ID and Thread ID in Gmail is explained below:

Refers to a unique identifier for an individual email message.
Every email that is sent or received will have a unique message ID.
The Message ID gets affixed to the email’s header in accordance with the RFC 822 standard.
Message-IDs, are generated by the first mail server. A common method of generating such ID is by combining the time and domain name, for example:
```
Message-ID: <950124.162336@example.com>
```

Refers to the identifier for a conversation or thread of messages in Gmail.
Gmail groups emails with the same subject into threads or conversations to keep related emails together. A thread can contain multiple email messages, and each of these messages will have its own unique message ID. However, all the messages in the same thread will share the same thread ID.
To put it simply: If you think of an email thread as a chain, the thread ID would identify the entire chain, while each individual link in the chain would have its own unique message ID.
To access the thread ID, you can check the browser’s URL as explained in the article on how to get thread ID, where THREAD_ID represents the thread ID for the conversation you’re viewing as follows:
```
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/THREAD_ID 
```