How Do I Automatically Expand My Gmail Conversations?
In this week’s tech support column on Lifehacker, we tackle a relatively simple problem with Gmail, but it’s probably very annoying if you emphasize how your email looks. (This is fine!)
Although formally this question was submitted by a reader of Lifehacker, I owe it to you readers to admit that it was actually the mother of editor-in-chief Virginia Smith . And formally she sent the question to Virginia, not me, but I liked it so much that I thought it was worth discussing. Miss Smith writes:
“Please share information on how to work with those annoying Gmail lines. They drive you crazy. “
On further investigation, she explained:
“The way they don’t show some responses and repeat others, and put the response to the last email at the bottom of the line, and so on. Usually you can’t even get to the last message. Very maddening.
I think Virginia’s mom eventually realizes that she needs a few more options to customize Gmail to her liking – if they exist. Here’s the good news: they exist, whether you’re messing with the settings in Gmail itself or using third-party extensions to hack together regardless of the format you love to use the most.
To specifically address Ms. Smith’s problems, one simple way to view all the emails in a thread at once is to turn off the conversation view in Gmail. To do this, open Gmail in your browser and click the “Settings” icon. Click on Settings (word) and scroll your eyes down until you see the Preview Conversation option.
Turn this off and every email you receive will now appear as a separate entry in your inbox. Clicking on the most recent email in a thread will show the full content of the thread (assuming people kept a history of replies in their replies), and it will all be in reverse chronological order – the last message is at the top, and getting older and older as they go. as you go down the chain.
If you don’t like this approach, there are alternatives. When you open an email conversation, you can always click the up / down arrow button in the upper right corner of your messages to manually expand all messages. It’s tedious, but it’s an option.
I think an even better trick is to enable keyboard shortcuts via the Gmail settings menu. Then pressing a semicolon (;) will expand all messages in the thread, and pressing a colon or Shift + semicolon should collapse them all. It’s not as smooth as some features or extensions that automatically expand all messages in a conversation – while still trying to find it – but a single key press on the keyboard is pretty close.
How to move new Gmail messages from bottom to top
As far as the bottom-of-thread aspect of your question goes, I guess you’d probably be happier if you could flip your Gmail feed and put the most recent message at the top with older messages. below. Fortunately, there is a Chrome extension that can replace that for you: the Gmail reverse dialog . (It’s also available for Firefox .) CloudHQ also has a Gmail Conversation Thread Reversal extension, which adds a button that you can use to invert (or revert) messages from a conversation.
This should cover whatever you mention in your message to Virginia, Miss Smith. However, there are many other ways to customize Gmail to your liking. (I really like the Simplify Gmail extension, for example.)
As always, before using browser add-ons, check your Gmail settings or interface to see if you can activate a new way to interact with your messages. If not, read the extension reviews first, see if it’s popular, and do a quick web search to make sure you’re not giving your inbox keys to an unscrupulous extension author. You should never be too careful!