This article is a part of the Gmail Tips series.

Gmail groups all replies with their original message, creating a conversation.

Let's say you're planning to have dinner with three of your closest friends. You send all three a message asking for restaurant suggestions. With Gmail, each of your friends' responses will be grouped with your original message, creating a single conversation in your inbox. This puts the entire conversation in context and makes your inbox easier to manage.

In other email systems, each of your friends' responses appear as a separate message in your inbox, forcing you to wade through all your mail to follow the conversation. Gmail makes it much easier -- you can view all your dinner plan messages at once.

When you open one message in a conversation, all of your related messages will be stacked neatly on top of each other, like a deck of cards. We call this Conversation View. In Conversation View, each new message is stacked on top of the ones that arrived before it, so that the newest message is always the one you see first.