It's bound to happen sooner than later. Your GMail inbox is suddenly filled up with a long message thread from that annoying family relative or mailing list you just subscribed to.

You don't want to delete the messages for fear of missing something, but you also don't want the entire discussion thread cluttering up your inbox.

What can you do? Use GMail mute feature to automatically archive the messages so you can view them later.

When a message is muted, new messages added to the conversation (email thread) bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived.

To mute a message, either open the message or click the check box next to the message (or messages that you want to mute) and click on More Actions.

In the pull down window select Mute. You will then see the following message:

Once muted the message will not be marked read and will be archived. If you created a filter, the message will be processed by the filter.

To locate the message conversation threads after they have been muted, go to All Mail and search using the search term is:muted

All message thread that were muted in the conversation will now be visible.

To un-mute a conversation, simply move them back to the inbox, by selecting Move to Inbox from the More Actions drop down box. This will move the entire conversation to your inbox and remove the mute action, so that future messages are also delivered to your inbox.

One drawback I found with GMail Mute feature, after muting a conversation, is when your address appears in the To: or Cc: field, the conversation will pop back into your inbox.