Comments on: Viewing Gmail Messages with No Label

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 30 May 2010 14:44:30 +0000

Following on from Bill’s comment above about some still showing up, I had the same issue and it seems to be that the search only works if the label was applied to the first message in a conversation.
What I did was unlabel them and apply the label again.

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:53:06 +0000

I don’t believe anyone has addressed the problem of having conversations that still show up when some of the messages within those conversations match the search. The solution is relatively simple, as long as you don’t have a ton of labels and/or filters: Select all conversations in a given label, then move them to a new label. This will label ALL messages within each conversation. Then the search works perfectly as given.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:26:17 +0000

Steve, I don’t think there’s a wildcard. At least not to my knowledge. It would be nice if they just added a system label like the “Unread” label

l:^u
l:unread
label:unread

Will all show unread messages. Why not a l:nolabel system tag?

SFD – no problem. Matt. Tom. Hey. I’ll answer to anything that’s not insulting.

By: sfd

sfd — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:25:50 +0000

Tom,

sorry, accidentally called you Matt – again. thanks for the info.

best regards
sfd

By: sfd

sfd — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:23:47 +0000

Matt -

yes! finally able to search for unlabeled mail! thanks a lot.
also used your information to be able to create quick searches that search for labeled mail in inbox (so I can archive them quickly) and all sorts of other useful tricks

thanks a lot again.

best regards
sfd

By: steve

steve — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:50:54 +0000

does anyone know if there’s a wildcard operator? ALL of my labels start with “INBOX\” so a wildcard would solve my problems, although that doesn’t seem to be working when I try it.

-label:{INBOX\*}

By: Hugo Heden

Hugo Heden — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:32:31 +0000

Hmm, maybe I’m missing something, but I think I have a better solution :-) (Ok, I’m probably totally missing something, but here goes)

The Skip-Inbox-mehod.

The idea is do this all “backwards”: Let *no* email with a Label applied end up in the “Inbox”. The Inbox will be that interesting place where you notice those unknown unknowns — only *unlabeled* messages end up there.

To emulate the functionality of the regular Inbox (now that we’ve sort of “ruined” the real one), use a new Label called TheBigInbox.. and a create a new Filter that will apply that Label to *all* messages:

* Matches: from:(*)
* Do this: Apply label “TheBigInbox”

Why is this better? Well, it’s *easier* to tell each Filter (that applies a Label) to “Skip Inbox” than to enumerate all Labels (handling spaces and using curly braces and whatnot) in a query. And when a new Filter (Label) is created, there is no need to edit that cumbersome search query with curly braces and all, just tell it to “Skip Inbox” — that’s all! This should be more maintainable, right? Two examples:

== The following filters are applied to all incoming mail: ==

* Matches: from:(webmaster@donaldrumsfeld.com)
* Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “Donald”

* Matches: list:”known-unknowns.com”
* Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “known-unknowns”

Thanks,

– Hugo

By: Andre

Andre — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:20:19 +0000

The way not to do it every time and make only unlabelled messages show:
1 – Create a label and call it UNLABELLED for instance
2 – Create a filter with the following code in the “Doesn’t have:” space:
l:label1 OR l:label2 OR l:label3 OR …. OR from:me OR in:chat (replacing label1, label2, etc with the names of your labels)
3 – Click “Next step >>” and in “Apply the label:” choose UNLABELLED or whatever name you’ve given to your new label in step 1.
4 – Click “create filter”.
5 – From now on to see only unlabelled messages click on UNLABELLED label.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:24:39 +0000

Hey Wander,
Thanks for the tip.

The problem with that is that you have to do it every time, and then you also have to use stars that way.

Once you set it up, my method gives you one-click access to all those messages without any other steps.

Which method you prefer would depend on how often you do this. If you do it a lot, it’s worth the overhead to set up my method. If you just want to do it rarely, then your method is probably less effort overall.

By: Wander

Wander — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:12:33 +0000

The trick to find ONLY the unlabeled mails (neither those emails who are in a conversation)

The method is the following:

Step 1: Seach for mails containing all labels using the OR-operator (ie. label:label1 OR label:label2 OR label:label3 etc.)

Step 2: Star al these conversations.

Step 3: create a new label (ie. LABELWITHOUTSTAR)

Step 4: Seacht for conversations without a star ( -is:starred)

Step 5: Select al these conversations and apply the LABELWITHOUTSTAR label.

Finished!

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:38:26 +0000

No Sam, I don’t mean archive. Archive is Archive and Delete is Delete.

I don’t want to archive spam mails, non-spam mass mails about Home Depot’s Labor Day sale, one-line mails from a friend where someone says “Okay, Sunday at 7:30 then” which are useless come 7:31 on Sunday. I suppose I would also delete embarrassing and incriminating emails if I had any of those, though I try to not write those in the first place!

Ideally, I want messages that only have some information that I could conceivably care about cluttering up my archives.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:19:09 +0000

If I’m reading your lament about deleting messages correctly, and you actually mean archive, try using “[” while in a message. It archives the messages and goes to the next one. If not, never mind.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:38:29 +0000

Thanks guys and thanks Chris for that tip!

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:03:30 +0000

Thanks for this!

You might be interested to know that slashes (/) for subfolders also get replaced by hyphens, so to exclude ‘top folder/subfolder’ you would use ‘-label:top-folder-subfolder.

Square brackets don’t get changed though, so to exclude ‘[Imap]/Drafts’, you would use ‘-label:[imap]-drafts’.

By: raju vusirikala

raju vusirikala — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:54:58 +0000

Tom – thanks for the post. I was initially hestitant to do it as i had 50+ labels and finally tried it. It worked as expected.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:53:34 +0000

I haven’t tried it yet, but you’re right, there is a Greasemonkey script (two actually).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13937
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/36752

By: arsix

arsix — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:54:11 +0000

thanks!

I also remember there being a greasy monkey script that would add a shortcut to your list of labels and call it “unlabeled”, clicking it would lists all the unlabeled messages.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:53:47 +0000

Thanks a million for this it really helps.

What I found annoying was that it was also bringing in all my chat logs. I found starting the search queury with in:inbox solved this.

So my search looks like this:
in:inbox -{label:Label1 Label2 Label-three}

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:04:45 +0000

Thanks Matt. I’m sure you’re not the only one as the designers must really like it this way and my nephew thinks the gmail interface is near perfect. I would just love it have it as a setting (i.e. action to take on deleting current message).

I hope the unlabelled message thing works for you. It didn’t work for Jill and I tried to help by email, but I just couldn’t get my method to work for her.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:59:30 +0000

Thanks for the tip. Just what I was looking for.

But regarding:

“aside from Gmail not having a decent way to delete a message without get kicked back to the message list (instead of just going to the next message like every other email client on the planet”

Just for the record, there are people (at least one?) that prefers this behavior. I selectively scan and read my inbox, leaving unread the messages I may not want to deal with at the moment. Many (most) of these can be determined just from sender/subject.