How to escape chain mail from hell

If you’re a Gmail user and find yourself in the middle of an email thread that you’d rather not be a part of, you can excuse yourself from the thread, without causing a commotion.

This is helpful when it’s not appropriate to reply all and say “Please stop replying all.” Here’s how to do it:

Open the email thread you’d like to drop out of and click on “More” in the upper-right.

In the drop-down, select “Mute.”

That’s it! Now the messages in that thread will skip your inbox and will be archived.

They’ll only reappear in your inbox if a new message in the conversation is addressed to you and nobody else, or if you’re added to the “To” or “Cc” line in a new email.

If you need to find the muted emails in the future, you can type “is:muted” in the Gmail search bar.

And if it turns out you miss being a part of the thread and want to know what everyone’s talking about, you can always unmute the conversation by going back to “More” and clicking on “Unmute.”

Then you can simply move the thread back to your inbox and be part of the conversation again.