in:inbox -l:YWPHI

shows me the contents of my inbox, minus items labelled YWPHI.

i have a label which is called: appl

and i want the search to show me the inbox without the massages with the label appl.
So I typed in:
in:inbox -(label:appl)
and it doesnot work.

i tried this either:
in:inbox -label:appl

and it doesnot work too.

any suggestions???

There’s a nice list of system labels over at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/hidden-labels-in-gmail.html

-from:(steve@sterndata.com) -{l:inbox l:label1 l:label2 l:label3 l:lable4 l:label5 l:label6}

I seem to be picking up sent mail.

Brett, aside from the issue with not being able to see items with no labels, what else is wrong?

Google,
While the idea of “labels” is somewhat innovative, it is poorly implemented. Please fix this!

I’m not really sure. For me it works roughly as expected. It will progress to the next page (21 to 40 of 172) without issue except that the “of” part keeps changing until it finally calculates the true result and switches to “21 to 40 of many”.

To be honest , though, I’ve finally thrown in the towel and just use search to locate email.

Suggestions?

1) Near the “Search” button, click on “Show search options”
2) Fill in the “From” field with -Your-Name, to exclude items from “Sent Mail”
3) Fill in the “Doesn’t have” field with “l:Inbox OR l:label1 OR l:label2 OR …”
4) Click the “Search Mail” button to test

When the search is satisfactory:

5) Select the whole URL field in your browser
6) Click the “Compose Mail” button, paste the URL into the body of the message, add a suitable title, and mail this to yourself.

Now you have an email that you can archive with a clever title you can remember. Find the mail, click on the URL within and the search is re-created whenever you need it. As an email message, this follows to all platforms, not just your present browser.

Also, when you click the URL, the original search form is re-created, and you can revise the search with new labels when needed.

-Scott-

I’ve also found that when you have two or more words making up a label, you can use the hyphen (“-”) for the space and get the proper results, for example:

-label:{Priority-One Priority-Two}

would bring up all messages that do not have these labels:
Priority One
Priority Two

Thanks again!

@James
Slashes are special and are replaced with a “-” so for example, if I have

Websites/test1/test2

the search label is “websites-test1-test2″

All the other characters are just used as they are.

For Example:

__Purchases/2010/Tax Deductible (Has underscores and multiple slashes for path)
[Imap]/Sent (brackets and slash for path)
Clients/Finished (Just a slash to denote path)
Jobs – Applied (spaces and a hyphen)

Thanks!

How about this:

1) select ALLMAIL, move all to inbox
2) go into each label, select all in that label and ARCHIVE

now the inbox should only contain emails that don’t have a label.

This works for me in the short term to sort all my old “archived” emails that previously had no label.

hope it helps someone.

Karen :)

Javed, thanks for the idea, but the problem is when I want to look at unlabelled emails that I have already archived. I archive all emails as I process them. I could create a label called “misc” and label every single email, but that’s a hassle.