Gmail – How to follow email conversations

I wanted to see if there way a way to remove an email thread from my inbox but still keep my sent emails in the sent folder.

The best way to do this is to use the strength of the gmail labels and archiving system.

Use labels to attach key phrases to the conversation. Each message/conversation can have multiple labels. The conversations in your inbox have the "Inbox" label. Clicking the archive button, removes the "Inbox" label. The conversation still has the "All Mail label, plus what ever other labels you have attached to the conversation. The conversations that include a message you sent can be found under the "Sent Mail" label.

The list of labels on the left side of the window allows you to quickly show only those conversations with that label. You can also use In:labelx or label:labelx in a search string to find a conversation with that label.

Hypothesis: The fact that some of the reply text is collapsed is confusing you into thinking that part is missing.

Click a ... box in the message to expand the collapsed text. Gmail is trying to help you out by hiding (initially) the text that you've read before, and it is really helpful.

It should not matter if you use the Reply button or the r key. And I don't think it matters if any of the text is selected.

(Also, if you want to forward an entire message thread rather than just a particular message with whatever previously quoted text it contains, ... well I thought there's a "forward entire thread" command in the pull-down menu but I don't see it right now. Maybe it shows up only when there's a non-linear tree of messages in the thread.)