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I have a filters set up for a number of mailing lists. If I get an email from any of those, it gets a particular label and skips my inbox. However, when I actually go through this list, I want to be able to tag certain conversations as 'interesting' so that any new emails that get added to the conversation show up in my inbox. Is this possible?

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I guess the real question here is how do you set priority to filters, and can you set a "don't filter further" option. I don't have an answer to either of those, unfortunately. –  Peter Boughton Jul 8 '10 at 17:38
You can't. Gmail processes all filters seemingly simultaneously. See webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1608/… –  Al E. Jul 8 '10 at 17:56
Bah. Unless Google have explicitly programmed them to be done independently, there must be an order under the covers. So I guess it turns into if/how we get Google to uncover that ability... which prompts this question: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/2580/… –  Peter Boughton Jul 8 '10 at 23:05

3 Answers 3

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.

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"Since Gmail keys off of the subject" - huh? Gmail filters works on from/to also, as well as other headers - the latter not obvious from the UI, but if you look at filters after creating them you get stuff like from:(someone@somewhere), list:(xyz.googlegroups.com), and so on. –  Peter Boughton Jul 8 '10 at 17:43
Sorry. I was interrupted before I could elucidate. I'll fix my answer. –  Al E. Jul 8 '10 at 17:54

One alternative is to make a new label, say, _cool, and apply it to those conversations you want to follow. The underscore will move it to the top of your list of labels. Then, when a new email comes in, the label name will be bolded. Although this will not route those messages to the inbox, it should be easy to train yourself to glance at the label list.

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Have you tried "Star"ring the interesting conversations? Not quite the same as seeing them in your inbox, but you can click the Starred items link and see them all the interesting ones easily. It's also totally independent of your inbox and other labels.

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