If you add the conversation in your Inbox (i.e., apply the Inbox label to it) it'll show as new when new items appear. That would preclude Archiving them, however, as that would just remove them again.
Since Gmail keys off of the subject for threading messages together, you could probably create a filter that looks for the text of the subject of the thread you're following and "apply label 'Inbox'".
This is just conjecture, though. I haven't tried it myself.
I can think of two options available, neither of which are elegant:
- Add a
-to:my-team@example.com to all the other filters that may archive the message.
- Use a variation of the above but instead of hard-coding the address, add a descriptive label.
There's no option to send an email to the inbox via a filter. Your only option is to prevent the message from being archived in the first place.
Solution #1: This one's pretty simple. So, for example, say you have the filter:
- when mail matches
to:other-team@example.com, archive the message
You need to change it to:
- when mail matches
to:other-team@example.com -to:my-team@example.com, archive the message
To use this negation, it may be easier to type in the "has the words" box.
Using this solution doesn't require you to maintain the filter order. The only downside is that if you have multiple email addresses that you need to keep (e.g. my-team2@example.com, my-team3@example.com, etc.), using this method you would need to add all of those to each filter. This can become hard to maintain. That's where solution #2 comes in...
Solution #2:
This one is more complicated and relies on the way Gmail processes filter rules. Basically it processes them from the top down. This means that if you modify one (which causes it to go to the bottom), you will need to remember to reorder your filters, so that it works correctly again.
You create the following filters, in this order:
- when mail matches
to:my-team@example.com, apply the label dont-archive.
- when mail matches
to:my-team2@example.com, apply the label dont-archive.
- when mail matches
to:my-team3@example.com, apply the label dont-archive.
- when mail matches
to:other-team@example.com -label:dont-archive, archive the message
When creating the last filter, it will warn you about using the label. This message can be safely ignored, since you ordered the filters correctly.
Tip for solution #1:
Of course, if the email addresses are very similar, you might be able to use Gmail's limited stemming in order to use solution #1 with multiple addresses (e.g. instead of using -to:my-team@example.com, use -to:(my @example.com) which will also match my-team2@example.com in this case.
Best Answer
Alas, the "mute" feature only keeps incoming messages from putting that thread back into the inbox. (1) It doesn't keep the thread out of a label even if you use a label as a secondary inbox. (2) There's no equivalent of "mute" to mute a thread from another label. (3) Filters can't test if the incoming message is going into a muted thread.
Archive or mute Gmail messages says:
And in the Help Forum:
Filter criteria seem to apply to incoming messages before filter actions. They apply after spam classification even though the UI warns otherwise. So this does work:
If
-is:muteworked in a filter (i.e. if the test applied to the new message's thread instead of to the new message itself, which isn't yet in a muted thread), you could use one filter to skip the inbox and a second filter with the same criteria plus-is:muteto apply the label.Or similarly, if the filter criteria could test labels on the new message's thread, you could move your undesired threads to a different label
mutedas a hack way to mute them, then use a pair of filters with-label:mutedas part of the second filter's criteria.But Gmail doesn't currently work that way. You can use the Send Feedback feature (in the gear menu) to request one of these tweaks.
As a desperate way to handle an occasional annoying thread, you could add a filter just for that thread which just removes it from the Inbox and the alternate lable.
More ideas: Write a Google Apps Script, or a Greasemonkey script, or a Chrome extension to extend Gmail.