How to Select A Sub-Conversation in Gmail Chats


Have you ever had a long, multi-person conversation, and you wanted to concentrate on a particular sub-conversation with one person? In Google Chat, the conversations are stored automatically by default. You can select or extract the sub-conversations in Gmail chats easily.

Also check out different ways to simplify your mail search in Gmail.

Let’s say you e-mailed three of your friends, Sashank, Aditya, and Pari.  with the subject “wassup?” and asked them all “what are you doing?”. They all replied back and now you’ve gotten into three separate sub-conversations, all within the same Gmail conversation. There is an easy way to concentrate on your sub-conversation with, say, Aditya.

  • Simply do the following search for : subject:“going okay”(from:aditya OR to:aditya)
  • Then when you click on the conversation, it will open up with only the matching messages expanded. The “to:” operator finds stuff in the to/cc/bcc fields.
  • If you also cc-ed or bcc-ed Aditya in other messages that you don’t want to match the search , then do the search:  subject:“going okay” (from:aditya OR (to:aditya -cc:aditya -bcc:aditya))

The “-cc:aditya” and “-bcc:aditya” terms eliminate the possibility of matching on messages cc-ed or bcc-ed to Aditya. Thus you can get or extract sub conversations from Gmail chats and filter your chat conversation searches according to your needs.

Filed under: Google
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August 17, 2009 by: Prasanth Chandra

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