How to forward just one email from a long Gmail thread

You're in a Gmail conversation that's 30 replies deep and you only need to send one of those messages to someone else. Not the whole back-and-forth. Just the one. Gmail makes that harder than it should be. Here's how to do it by hand, and a quicker way if you do it a lot.

Why it's awkward in Gmail

Gmail groups messages into conversations. When you forward, it usually drags the whole visible trail along with it. So the person you send it to can see every earlier message, which is often more than you want them to, and sometimes it's confidential.

The manual way

1. Open the conversation and scroll to the message you actually want to send.
2. On that message, not the whole conversation, click the three-dot menu and choose Forward.
3. Look at the draft before you send. It might still have quoted text from earlier replies stuck above or below it. Delete anything that isn't the message you want.
4. If that message had an attachment and it didn't come across, go find it and attach it again.
5. Add your recipient and send.

That gets the job done, but it's fiddly. The trimming and re-attaching is the annoying bit, and it's easy to accidentally leave a line of someone else's email in there.

A quicker way

If you're forwarding single messages out of threads all day, which is normal in law, accounting and recruitment, Threadclip does it in one go. You pick the message, it brings the right attachments, you check the recipient, and it sends just that message with no quoted trail. Try it free.

FAQ

Can I forward one Gmail message without the conversation history? Yes. Forward from the individual message's three-dot menu and delete the quoted trail, or use a tool that strips it for you.

Why does Gmail include the whole thread when I forward? Gmail's conversation view groups messages together, so a forward carries the quoted history unless you trim it yourself.

What about an attachment from earlier in the thread? If the file was sent on an earlier message, it won't always come along. You may need to find it and attach it again.