A mute conversation in Gmail is a conversation that has been set to not notify you of new messages.

Muting an email means that the email conversation will be silenced. You can effectively do a Mute (ignore) on any message and push the entire conversation to the archive folder. To mute, select one or more messages in your inbox, click the three vertical dots “more” menu, and select Mute.

In other words, if you mute a conversation in Gmail then all further messages related to it will be archived: you’ll still be able to search for the conversation to view new messages, but they will not be in your Inbox.

Muting a conversation can be a helpful way to declutter your inbox and keep only the messages that you’re interested in. There are a couple of reasons you might want to mute a conversation in Gmail:

  1. You’re not interested in the conversation anymore and don’t want to see any more messages about it in your inbox
  2. You’re waiting for someone else to reply (you are just on BCC) to the conversation and don’t want to be alerted every time someone else responds

Even though emails added to the conversation after you mute are in not in your inbox, you will still be able to find messages. Muted messages will be visible under the folder “All Mail.” You can find all muted messages by entering in the search bar the following command: “is:muted”

If you want to unmute any thread, open the message you want to unmute, select messages, click the three vertical dots “more” menu, and select Unmute.