How to mute an email address in Gmail
Gmail has a feature that lets you mute an email thread or conversation. This allows you to disable notifications for emails that you’re a recipient of but that have nothing to do with you. The messages still arrive in your inbox and you can go read them whenever you want. This mute feature only works for an email thread. If you want to mute an email address so that you no longer get alerts when you get an email from it, but you don’t want to mark it as spam or block it, you’re going to have to get creative with filters and maybe also use a label.
Mute an email address
Open Gmail and open a message from the sender you want to mute emails from. Click the more options (three dots) button and from the menu, select the ‘Filter messages like this’ option.
In the options panel that opens, click the ‘Create Filter’ button.
The options panel will change to show you what the filter can do. To mute emails from the email address, you need to select the ‘Skip the Inbox (Archive it)’ option. This will automatically archive the message and you won’t get alerts for it. The message will not be marked as a read message though so if you want it to also be marked as read, select the ‘Mark as read’ option.
Finally, you need to be proactive about any future scenarios where you might need to go back and read these messages. To make it simple to find them all, sort them to a folder. Select the ‘Apply the label’ option and open the dropdown next to it. Select an existing label, or create a new one. It’s up to you. You can enable other options in this panel if you want but these three are sufficient for what we’re trying to do. Click ‘Create filter’ and you will no longer be bothered with emails from that particular address.
You should practice a little caution when you use filters like this. They are best applied to emails that send automated messages but you can use them on any type of sender/email address.
If at any time you want to remove the filter, you need to click the cogwheel button on Gmail’s web interface and select Settings from the menu. Go to the ‘Filters and blocked addresses’ tab and delete the filter that targets the email you want to get new message alerts for.
