Unwanted flagging in Mail

Flag the individual message, not the conversation.

Scroll through the conversation, select the message you wish to flag, then click the Fag button.

If you select the conversation, then all messages are "selected" when you click the Flag button.

This is from the Mail user's Guide.

The following assumes you have View menu > Organize by Conversation selected.

The left column is the Message List. As it states at the top, only the most recent message is show in that list.

The right side of the window is the Viewing pane. You can see that each individual message in the Conversation is shown in a separate box in the pane.

There is a "Have Fun" message at the top, followed by a "Wow!…" message, and finally a cut off message with an Image attachment.

With the Conversation selected as show in this screen shot, all three of the individual messages would be flagged if you clicked the Flag button.

If you instead clicked on the "Wow!…" message in the pane on the right, and then clicked the Flag button, then only that individual message would be flagged.

To deselect the flag from all of the messages, select the message in the Message List as shown above, then click the Flag button to toggle the flag Off (or use Clear Flag in the popup menu).

If you do not have Organize by Conversation enabled in the View Menu, then you need to select each of the individual messages and click the Flag button to toggle the Flag off.

You can select multiple messages (or multiple conversations) in the Message List by selecting the first, hold Shift, then select the last. To multi-select non-contiguous messages, hold down the Command key and click each message.

It was supposed to be the "Flag" button. Autocorrect must have changed it to something else that was censored.

Each message in the conversation a break between it and the next message. If you click on the individual message, you'll see a highlight rectangle around the selected message.

The item in the Message List section is the entire conversation, all emails with similar subject. You have to look in the viewing pane to see each individual message.

How do you highlight 'conversation'

Just click on it. The item in the left column is the "conversation." It is not necessarily a single message.

When it is a conversation, the individual messages of the conversation are shown on the right.

Are you not seeing all of the individual conversations in the right viewing pane?

The brackets on that guide are just added markup to show you where the messages are located. They do not show in Mail.

When you select the item in the left pane, it selects the entire conversation. You don't have to select all of the messages in the conversation. Just click on the Flag button to change all of the messages that were sent to you. It should not affect ones that you sent. But, they shouldn't be flagged if that is how they got flagged.

If the sent ones are flagged, then I guess you would have to select each individually in the right pane.