Article by George Norman

On 15 Dec 2009

Let’s assume for a moment that you subscribe to a lot of active mailing lists. Let’s also assume that you do not have a lot of time to go over your email, so before you have the chance to read an email it already has tons of replies. When you do have a little time on your hands, you check your inbox, start reading a quite long discussion – but your time runs out before you have the chance to go through all the items in the discussion.

It would be nice if you could pick things up where you left off. The catch is that if you mark the thread as read, each item will be marked as read – even the discussions you did not have the time to go over. Marking it as unread is not much help either, as Software Engineer Jenny Ross explains.


“If I mark the thread as unread, it will return to its previously read state without updating to show what I just read,” said Ross. “When I come back to it, I'll have to search for the last thing I remember reading. If I star the first message I still want to read instead, I might not remember that it needs to be read when I'm in my inbox later (and when I do read it, I'll have to expand lots of messages before I can read the conversation properly).”

There is a new Gmail Labs offering called Mark Unread From Here that will help. Just turn it on (instructions below) and you will see a “Mark unread from here" option in the drop down menu in the upper right-hand corner of messages. Click this option and Gmail will know you want to see that message when you open the thread at a later time.

Here is what you have to do to turn on the Mark Unread From Here offering in Gmail Labs:

1. Go to Gmail (click here – a new tab will open), enter your login credentials and click "Sign in". If you are already signed into Google, click this link and you can just skip step 2 in this tutorial.
2. In the top right corner of the screen, right next to your user name you should be able to see “Settings”; click it. Now locate “Labs” and click it as well.
3. Scroll down until you find a Labs feature called Mark Unread From Here. Select Enable, then click Save Changes (there’s a Save Changes tab at the top of the experiments list and at the bottom as well) and you’re done.

Tags: Google, Gmail, Labs, Mark Unread From Here

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