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In Google Inbox (Google's new email UI), is there a way to get a permalink to specific email threads or messages?

This could be done in Gmail simply by opening a thread, and then copying the link in the browser's address bar.

I want to do this so I can include a link to the relevant email thread along with items on my external to-do list. (Dropping that to-do list in favor of using the new "reminder" features in Google Inbox is not what I'm looking to do.)

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    I'm voting to close this question because Inbox by Gmail was retired in April, 2019
    – Rubén ♦
    Jul 6, 2019 at 16:57

5 Answers 5

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Short answer

[UPDATE]: There isn't a permalink to the read view of a message but you could use the URL that corresponds to the search for message ID.

Explanation

Inbox by Gmail (IbG) and Gmail itself are two different web applications. They have access to the same mailbox, some features are the same, some are similar and there are several that are unique to each of them.

As I understand, IbG doesn't use URLs to set the message/conversation to be displayed as there isn't a single message/conversation view.

It's worth to say that IbG has some task management like features: Pin, Snooze, mark conversations as done and set reminders.

[UPDATE 2016-11-08] Workaround

Use the URL corresponding to the search for the message ID to display only one conversation.

To get the message ID

  1. Click on the three dots button of a message, then on Show original.
  2. Copy the message ID

To get the URL to be used as permalink

  1. Paste the URL in the Search box
    4. Replace @ by %40
  2. Prepend rfc822msgid: to the front of the message id.
  3. Press enter
  4. Copy the URL

Or

Prepend rfc822msgid: to the message ID, encode this string and append it to https://inbox.google.com/u/0/search/

1: H/T to Matt Hulse. See his answer

References

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The concepts in Ruben's answer are correct, however the syntax appears to have changed. Here are the steps that worked for me:

  • Obtain the message id in the same way that Ruben did.

  • Paste the message id into search bar. (No need to replace the '@' symbol.)

  • Prepend rfc822msgid: to the front of the message id.

This worked where simply pasting the message id didn't.

I got this idea from Google Support.

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I just made and published an extension for Google Chrome that adds permalinks in Google Inbox.

It looks like this, so far:

You can install it for free, from Google Web Store: Permalinks for Google Inbox.

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    Works great, thanks @AdrienJoly
    – Daugmented
    Nov 28, 2017 at 13:57
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Yes there is, with caveats explained at the end of the answer.

Just copy the subject of the thread, paste it in the search box between "" and press Search. The link you get back will give you the thread you need and can also be used by other people.

If the subject is too general, just grab the from and to fields, a sentence in the body of one of the emails or even the date and put it in the search box as well.

Caveats:

  1. Some punctuation characters in the subject line such as pipe (|) seem to goof this up and need to be removed from the search string. To solve this replace replace | by %7C, @ by %40 and so on.

  2. Sometimes there's not a good way to avoid having multiple messages be returned, such as a subject like "Remote Dial In Instructions" where multiple emails are sent over time with the same subject line, recipients, and from address.

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    Tried it! Caveats: (1) Some punctuation characters in the subject line such as pipe ("|") seem to goof this up and need to be removed from the search string. (2) Sometimes there's not a good way to avoid having multiple messages be returned, such as a subject like "Remote Dial In Instructions" where multiple emails are sent over time with the same subject line, recipients, and from address. Much better than nothing though, thanks for sharing this! (+1)
    – Jon Schneider
    Jan 28, 2016 at 19:12
  • @JonSchneider Your caveats are really relevant to the answer. Do you want to add them yourself or shall I? I am also eagerly awaiting for proper links to emails.
    – Alexandre Martins
    Jan 28, 2016 at 20:23
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    @JonSchneider I added your caveats to the answer. This makes the answer much more clear.
    – Alexandre Martins
    Feb 6, 2016 at 1:18
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    @Rubén You have a point. I now mention the existence of caveats at the beginning of the answer. Hopefully no one will be mislead now. Feel free to edit the answer if you can make it even less misleading. And thanks.
    – Alexandre Martins
    Oct 15, 2016 at 12:35
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    @JonSchneider: I updated my answer to include an alternative method that I figured out after reading this answer this week.
    – Rubén ♦
    Oct 15, 2016 at 14:35
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While this doesn't answer the question directly, I hope this provides an additional solution that I find gets towards the goal of creating a task from an email.

You can go to the tool icon in any project on Todoist and get an email specific to that project - including the inbox. When you send email to that address, a task is created in Todoist with the title of the subject, and you can embed labels, date, etc. in the subject as well.

There are pluses and minuses to it. The main minus is that you're not linking the actual email, so there isn't the direct connection that there is with the gmail extension. It's also slightly more work than the gmail plugin in that you have to take the message you want to make a task of, and forward it to that email address, and you don't have the ability to customize the task very much within Google inbox - ie you need to manually type out label names in the subject, if you want to specify a different project than the inbox you would need to find addresses for all your projects and set them up as contacts in Google, etc.

On the plus side, the text of the email gets embedded into a comment attached to your task, so in some ways it makes the link unecessary, since, at least for me, I used the link in many cases just to see the details of the email. This is of course not useful if the task is to email the person back, where having a direct link to the original email would of course be optimal. And the attachment often needs editing because Todoist doesn't format html email in a message and also gives you all the email headers, etc., so yet again, a bit more work if you want to have a clean and easy to read attachment.

The way I set it up is to create a contact called "Todoist Inbox" so I can quickly press "F" then "Todo..." and it will come up. It works well, and what I find I can do is if it's something that I might need the original email again, I can snooz it and thus I have a task that has a secondary "reminder" by coming back to my inbox and I can then either archive permanently or go back to look at the task I know I created (since it shows it was forwarded to my Todoist Inbox) - check to see I've done it if I don't recall what it was about, etc.

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  • Just to update this, Todoist has now made it so forwarded mail does not look like a big bunch of markup/code, and actually gives you a html version of an email as an attachment to your task when you forward it. It uses the subject as the title, and you can embed labels and due date in your subject as well, and the attachment shows up in your notes section as a special envelope icon that you can click on and see what appears to be the original email, so a lot better than previously. Still hopefull that they will create a full-blown extension, but I'm wondering if that's even possible.
    – Levi Wallach
    Dec 8, 2016 at 16:13

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