Gmail – Make Gmail Messages Disappear from a Label After They Are Read

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):

1. 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.

2. 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.

You can do searches that exclude certain labels. That is, searches like this will do what you expect: (label:MyLabel1 AND NOT label:inbox AND NOT label:MyBadLabel1)

That search will show you only messages that:

1. Do have MyLabel1
2. And do not have label inbox
3. And do not have label MyBadLabel1

The tricks are:

• to get yourself out of conversation mode! (As @Ruben says above.)
• to use UPPER CASE for the logic operators (AND NOT will work, and not won't)

If you leave "conversation mode" on, you will get confusing results. For example, doing that search above (with conversation mode on), will likely return messages that do NOT match your search.

It may be a bit weird.

Here's the deal:

• Conversations are collections of messages that all have the same Subject.
• When "conversation mode" is on, searches return entire conversations as results.
• So what should gmail search do if a conversation contains both a message that matches, and a message that does not match your search?
• You are probably expecting it to return conversations only if all messages in that conversation match.
• But that is not correct. Instead, Gmail search will return conversations even if only a single message in that conversation matches.
• So that means that if you do the same search above with "conversation mode" on, the results are likely to include messages that do not match your search!