How to view and reply to email conversations in Gmail

In this tutorial, you will learn a little bit about the unique way Gmail displays your messages.

This tutorial assumes that you are already logged in to Gmail.

Rather than showing a single entry for each individual email, Gmail groups an email together with all replies – sort of like a thread on a forum. This is referred to as a conversation.

As indicated by the (4) aside the first conversation, it contains four messages. The participants in the conversation are listed to the left of that.

To view a conversation, you can click anywhere on its row in the list, except on the controls at left.

Notice that this conversation only contains one message.

Click the Newer link to go to the conversation directly before this one in the Inbox.

The Older link works in a similar fashion.

There are a number of actions that you can perform on this conversation using the buttons directly below; we’ll look at how to use some of these in the tutorials that follow.

Click this link if you want to open the conversation in a New window.

Use this link to Print all messages in the conversation.

Scroll down.

Gmail will collapse all the messages in a conversation that you’ve read before, except for the newest one. Click on a message’s title to expand it.

Or, click Expand all to expand every message in the conversation.

Collapse all reverses that action.

Clicking show details will display some more information about this particular message.

In addition to Reply and Forward, you can also perform a number of actions on a specific email in a conversation.

Click the down arrow button to show these options.

To begin making a reply, you can also click in this textarea…

…and a standard Gmail composition form will appear.

Click Discard if you no longer wish to make a reply.

To return to the Inbox, click the Back to Inbox link.

That’s it! You now know how to view and reply to email conversations in Gmail.

For more information about managing your email messages and conversations, be sure to check out the tutorials that directly follow this one.