Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google appears to be developing a “related emails” feature for Gmail.
- When active, emails related to the one you’re reading would appear at the bottom.
- It’s not yet clear how Google will choose which emails to surface in this manner.
Recommendation algorithms are nothing short of ubiquitous, and it feels like you can’t read a news article, listen to a song, or watch a movie without immediately being presented with a bunch of suggestions for similar content. And while you can easily get caught up in endless debates about whether or not this is ruining our ability to make choices on our own, lots of people really enjoy the convenience it offers, and why not? It makes all the sense in the world that if you’re interested in one thing, you might also be interested in stuff that’s very similar to it. And if that’s good enough for media, why not email, too?
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We’ve been poking around Google’s new version 2025.04.06.745293309 build of Gmail for Android, and have uncovered what appears to be some early work towards a feature that will be able to show you emails related to the one you’re currently reading.
Code
<string name="related_emails_based_on_your_emails">Based on your emails</string>
<string name="related_emails_bottom_sheet_close_button_content_description">Close</string>
<string name="related_emails_current_email_indicator_text">Current email</string>
<string name="related_emails_failed_to_open_help_snackbar">Failed to open page</string>There’s not a ton to go on just yet, but the strings we’re seeing here paint a picture of an interface that might offer a selection of related emails to open as you scroll to the bottom of another. Probably our biggest question there is what kind of relationships would Gmail be looking for. Obviously, we’re talking about something less explicit than emails threaded together through replies, but will this mainly focus on the subject matter of the emails themselves, or maybe more on the specific people you’re sending them to?
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
So far we haven’t been able to get any of this actually working, but even without early insight into how these related emails will be chosen, this is clearly a direction Google is pursuing. Whether or not it will make it all the way through development and arrive as a finished feature, we can’t yet say, but we’ll absolutely be looking for signs of progress in future Gmail builds (and hopefully actually get the chance to see what this looks like in action).
