Gmail Tip #50: Changing Subject Text When Replying or Forwarding

(1 minute read)

Sometimes, you want to reply to or forward a message, but the Subject text is either annoyingly mangled, or simply unclear. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to clean up the Subject text to make it a bit cleaner? Read on to learn how to simply edit a message’s Subject text….

When composing a message, click on the "Edit Subject" link just above the editor toolbar. This opens an editable Subject text field. Make any changes you want here. When your message is sent and saved, the new Subject text will be used.

One point of note in doing this is that Gmail maintains conversations (grouped messages) by their Subject text, so altering the Subject text while composing a message will "break" that conversation, creating two conversations, one for each Subject. While this may be desirable in some cases, it may be unexpected if you don’t remember how Gmail handles conversations.

Also note that you can only edit the Subject text of messages while you are composing it. You cannot edit the Subject text of an existing message.