not me

October 5, 2008 8:09 PM

GMail lists "me" on every thread. How do I make it stop?

I don't know about you, but I am, unsurprisingly, on every thread in my inbox, either as originator or recipient. Any way to get GMail to not clutter the addressees field with what seems to be non-information?

Related, slightly harder question: If I send from another address (not my GMail address), say John Doe, then GMail displays "John Doe" instead of "me". I'd like to get rid of that, too.

posted by iconjack to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You would not be listed as "me" in any addressees field; your name would instead appear. "Me" would appear only on messages that you sent in response to another, on the index listing where the names of thread participants are displayed.

There may be ways to automatically delete messages that you have sent, from either GMail or another address, if that is what you want to do.
posted by yclipse at 8:32 PM on October 5, 2008

I'm not looking to delete any messages.

I'd like GMail not to list "me" (or John Doe if I'm sending from another address) on the index listing where the names of the thread participants are displayed.
posted by iconjack at 8:44 PM on October 5, 2008

I don't see an option in GMail, and I couldn't find any Greasemonkey scripts. So I think the answer is that you can't.
posted by sbutler at 9:07 PM on October 5, 2008

It only lists 'me' if you're an originator of a post to a thread.

If you were on an email list, there'd be plenty of threads that you didn't actually post to. I think you might just have to ignore those four characters or so ( me,), unless you want to get crazy complicated with a Grease Monkey script.

And if you do eventually end up with some threads that you haven't posted to, you'll probably want that back.

But by all means - try Grease Monkey if you're a coder.
posted by Elysum at 9:30 PM on October 5, 2008

Well, if Alice and Bob we're having a bunch of back-and-forth emails with you CC'd on them, then you wouldn't be listed as "me" right? Or am I misunderstanding?
posted by meta_eli at 9:31 PM on October 5, 2008

If you were BCC'ed on a message then you'd definitely not appear as a "me" in any field. So it does convey a modicum of information, although for most of us it's using two characters on screen to convey way less than 1 bit of information which ain't a great deal.
posted by jewzilla at 9:44 PM on October 5, 2008

So you want to remove any indication that you've participated in a conversation thread, either with your Gmail account or another? But without removing the part that you wrote? Seems like that sort of breaks the whole idea of threading a conversation.
posted by attercoppe at 12:42 PM on October 6, 2008

No, I just want GMail not to display my name, to me. I'm not trying to delete anything, and not trying to hide anything from anyone else. I know when I'm part of a thread. In fact, I am part of every single thread in my inbox. GMail only uses about 20 characters to display the thread participants. My name occupies over half of those precious 20 characters, pushing out the real information: the names of the other participants.
posted by iconjack at 2:50 PM on October 6, 2008