One thing first: In my opinion, shortcuts are a great way to work faster and more efficiently. As soon as there is a shortcut for functions in a program, you can be sure that I will use it – as long as I need the function regularly, at least.
At the beginning of the year, however, I d iscovered that there are shortcuts that can also cause damage. In my case, a single button in Gmail caused a lot of trouble.
[M] in Gmail is more dangerous than you think
What happened? As an editor at GameStar Tech, I often test different devices and report back to you. The testing process usually also includes sending the devices back to the manufacturer after the test.
Sometimes you have a clear deadline for the loan, sometimes – as in this case – you have to send the devices back spontaneously, which is usually not a problem.
It’s just stupid if I don’t hear about it for over two months because I pressed a simple button in Gmail. As it turned out, I muted the entire email conversation with “M” – and therefore didn’t respond to important inquiries for weeks.
When I was finally asked by a third party why I hadn’t been in touch for ages, it wasn’t initially clear to me what I had done wrong. I was horrified.
How could that happen? After a quick search for the sender of the missed emails, I quickly realized that I hadn’t read some emails at all. They had the label “Ignored.” After a short research it became clear: I must have accidentally pressed “M” over two months ago after I sent my last email to the sender.
Unfortunately, I can no longer reproduce how exactly this happened. Of course, this may just be an isolated case. It’s still frustrating. And I would like to warn you about this.
Ignore conversations with the shortcut [M]: In the Gmail shortcut list It quickly becomes clear that the “M” stands for Mute, in Europe “silent”. This allows you to ignore entire email conversations. New emails from the muted conversation will then not appear in your inbox.
This is certainly useful for messages that you don’t have in your inbox but still want to look up for reference at some point.
The nasty thing about it: It’s a shortcut that is triggered with just one button – and can therefore be triggered accidentally. Who came up with that?
Other functions that are only on one button are significantly less dangerous. “E” for archive, for example. If you accidentally trigger this function, you move a single email to the archive and that’s it. You will still see later emails in the conversation. Not so if you press “M”.
Everything went well again: I have now sent the device back and apologized what feels like thousands of times. And there is something good about the whole thing: hopefully this won’t happen to you in the future if you read this.
If, like me, you want to make sure that you don’t suffer a similar fate, you can also delete the shortcut.
So you will get the shortcut [M] in Gmail los
This is how you unmute muted emails: Click on All emails
in Gmail and searches for messages with the label Ignored
. Select an email and simply remove the label.
This is how you deactivate the shortcut: Luckily, you can change or delete some shortcuts in Gmail. To be on the safe side, you can deactivate the keyboard shortcut.
Here is a little step-by-step guide for you:
- In Gmail, click the gear icon in the top right
- Go to “View all settings”
- Look for “Advanced” in the tabs at the top of the settings.
- Enables the “Custom keyboard shortcuts” option and saves
- Select the newly appeared “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab
- Scroll to the shortcut for the “Ignore Conversation” function
- Change or delete the shortcut as needed and save
Now you should never run the risk of accidentally deleting conversations again.
By the way, there are significantly more practical shortcuts than bad ones. This one for example:
Have you ever made the same or similar mistake as me? How would you have reacted if something like that had happened to you? Do you know of similar “dangerous” shortcuts that you would like to warn about? Which shortcuts do you use most often? As always, let us know your opinions and experiences in the comments below!