Selectively Delete a Message from a Conversation Thread

Gmail’s threaded conversations have revolutionised the way many of us interact with our email, but one minor catch to the threaded interface is that if you want to delete one message in the thread, you have to delete them all. However, with a little extra legwork, it is possible to selectively remove messages from a conversation. Here’s how:

1. Delete the entire conversation by selecting the email and clicking the Delete button.
2. Now search for the deleted message (don’t go to your trash—search). A search as simple as in:trash will probably do. Then find and open that message.
3. Expand the message so you can see every email in the thread.
4. Now just click the Recover from Trash link for every email in the thread you want to keep until all that’s left is the email(s) you wanted to permanently delete.

One final optional step you might want to take—to immediately remove the deleted email—is delete the remaining conversation from the trash forever. (Gmail will delete it eventually, but if you really want to get rid of it, you probably want to do it now.) It’s not the simplest way to delete an email, but it’s really the only way to do so selectively in Gmail. Thanks Jay! UPDATE: As Dustin pointed out here, you actually can selectively delete messages from the drop-down arrow on the right of messages.