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How to Flag Individual Emails Using Gmail Message IDs

You should be organizing your Gmail inbox How to Sort Your Gmail Inbox by Sender, Subject, and Label How to Sort Your Gmail Inbox by Sender, Subject, and Label Can't find information in your Gmail inbox? We'll show you the five best ways to sort your emails. Learn these tweaks and you can find anything! Read More Fortunately, if your inbox is a mess, Gmail comes with a great search box that makes it easy to find lost emails.

But did you know that there is another little-known method of keeping track of important emails? Each email in the Gmail inbox has a unique message ID, and this specific identification number is the fingerprint of each email.

How to identify the message ID of an email in Gmail

The message ID is hidden in the background and you have to look in the email header to find it. But message identification is an important tracking tool, and it can also help you keep track of your critical emails outside of Gmail. Use it as a geeky email bookmark.

Gmail Message ID Finder is a Chrome extension that can help you locate the Message ID for a Gmail email:

  1. Install the Gmail message browser extension.
  2. Open Gmail and find the message you want the ID for. Expand the dropdown button next to Answer arrow.
  3. Click the Copy Message ID Option that has been added by the extension. The message ID is copied to the clipboard.
  4. To search for the email, paste the number into the Gmail search box and your email will appear in the results.

You can use this number on any document that needs to be emailed. It's a long, mind-numbing alphanumeric string, for example:

rfc822msgid: [email protected]

As shown in the video above, you can keep a running log of important emails in a spreadsheet. If you're working on a long project, Gmail Message ID can save you a lot of time if you need to check an old email. Please note that the ID is specific to your email account, so only you can use it.