Gmail – Can Gmail auto track replies of emails when conversation view is turned off

configurationgmailgmail-labels

I know Gmail for some time now allows conversation view to be turned off, thereby ungrouping the emails.

However, when doing so, any email replied to leaves no marker at all (as best I can tell), that the email was replied to. One can search in the "Sent Mail" to see something was sent, but when viewing the email itself (Note: I use the "Preview pane" from the Labs tab to view it), I do not see anything after I have replied:

letting me know I have replied and
linking the email to that reply.

I am hoping there is some other setting to do that. Otherwise, this seems to be a serious design flaw in the implementation of the ungroup conversation view setting. Ungrouping by subject is one thing, ungrouping to the point of not associating actual replies to the initial emails is overboard!

NOTE: I realize turning conversation view "on" associates the replies to the emails. My question concerns how they are/can be associated when turned off. I do not want emails with the same subject line grouped (hence why the view is off), but I do want to know which emails I've replied and what that reply is based on looking at the original email.

Best Answer

At this time the GMAIL web UI can't. The alternatives are to use a POP or IMAP client.

References
Gmail Help
http://support.google.com/mail

Gmail Help Forum
Turning conversation view OFF causing another problem: I can't see my replies in email threads.

Related Solutions

Gmail not grouping messages with the same subject from Google Groups

As a bit of a spoiler, we tested this last night. I have two email address (which I will call for the sake of example "test1@gmail.com" and "test2@gmail.com"), and then we did this:

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test1@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  blah blah whatever

and additionally

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test1@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  this should nest under the other

and voila, they nested. No work required. And then we did this:

To:      Rebecca <Recip@gmail.com>
From:    My Name <test2@gmail.com>
Subject: this is a test
Body:  does this nest with the others?

And it didn't nest!

So in other words, two emails from the same sender with the same subject will nest. Two emails from two different addresses with the same subject will not nest.

Gmail – How to mark / tag / label forwarded and replied to messages in Gmail

This is the best way I have found to make an automatic forwarded and replied to messages indicator / marker in Gmail - based on a filter (conversation view must be enabled):

Go to Settings -> Labels and create two new labels: Replied and Forwarded. You can also shorten their names to RPL and FWD. It doesn't matter what you label them, just as long as it has meaning to you.

You can also colorize the labels as you want - e.g Green for Replied and Blue for Forwarded.
Go to Settings -> Filters and create a new filter with only one condition - From: me. Make sure you apply the label to your inbox.
- You can also create two more filters for messages containing the words Re: and Fwd: in the subject, but some messages arrive with the word Re: in the subject, and some people delete the word Re: from the subject when they reply to a message.

However, this does not solve the problem entirely; for example, if I reply to a certain message, and the recipient replies back, then the conversation is still labeled as Replied. That's the reason conversations that include (someone, me) only indicate I have replied at least one time in the conversation.

If the conversation view is disabled - I won't have the problem mentioned above - but I won't be able to automatically mark / tag / label messages I have replied to, because my reply is not part of a conversation, and therefore I can't apply any generic filter to messages I have replied to.