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Google Tweaks 'Unread' Function In Gmail Conversations

For me, threaded messaging -- whether that be email, SMS, MMS, IM or whatever -- is the only way to go. Gmail has spoiled me in that regard. The latest adjustment Google has made to its Gmail product is a better way to fine-tune your unread emails within threaded conversations.

Threaded email is a lifesaver. By lumping all the messages with the same subject into one conversation, it is easier to keep track of replies and how an email chain progresses from start to finish. There's one problem, though. If you like to keep your "unread" messages to a minimum, marking just one email in a specific thread marks the entire thread as read, even if you haven't read the other emails.

David de Kloet, Software Engineer, remarks, "Since we at Google send and receive a lot of email, we found this pretty annoying. So we decided to fix it. Now if you're reading a conversation that had unread messages when you opened it and you mark it unread, Gmail will only mark those messages that were unread when you opened the conversation in the first place. It's a small change, but it's the little things that can make a UI feel right or wrong, and we hope this makes Gmail a little bit more right."

According to de Kloet, this change will only apply to Gmail as read on the desktop. He didn't say if Google plans to add the feature to the mobile version of Gmail at any point.

It may be a small tweak, but it can be a useful one if you need to more carefully manage exactly which emails are read and which aren't.

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