Loading ...For the life of me I cannot figure out why Google doesn’t just add a stupid button to Gmail for this, but anyway…
The tip here is how to find all your unread emails in Gmail. Let’s say you aren’t interested in the label on the mail, who it’s from or anything… you just want a list of unread emails to go through so you can see if you replied to all the ones that needed your attention.
Luckily, it’s really easy… just pop “label:unread” into your search box, and hit “Search Mail” or enter.
NOTE: For the sharp ones out there, you’ll likely hop right into Labels and try and create an “unread” label, but when you try this hitting the “Create” button simply does nothing… so it looks like Gmail supports this feature, but makes you jump through hoops to use it.
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November 21st, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Want to save 3 characters? Use “is:unread”.
November 21st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Oh nice, thanks for the tip Ben!
I had Greasemonkey installed a while back and an addon that supposedly added this to the Label box… it didn’t work quiet right for me, and I can’t get over that Gmail won’t just add this anyway… urrrggg
February 8th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for the great tip. You can create a label based on ‘label: unread’ by typing it in the “Has the words:” textbox. It will return the correct results. However, it will apply this label to all unread emails but will not REMOVE them from the email after they’ve been read. That makes sense but it’s amazingly dumb.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Zack very cool followup, thanks for posting that.
Is anyone else baffled why they haven’t just added a goddamn “Unread” label or something that is built it? I can’t figure out why they are so hellbent on making this hidden from normal use… I understand the idea is to use labels, but assuming you can’t hit 100% accuracy with labels and that everything flies into your inbox, you are bound to push mail beyond the first page that is unread and NOT labelled… seems like a really common use-case.
April 21st, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I commonly use: l:^u
July 31st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Thanks for the info. It seems weird why google don’t put a button that does this automatically!! especially with the new google labs idea… perhaps someone could propose the concept?
July 31st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Jason,
Totally agree… I have no idea why it’s so hard out of the box to find unread emails *especially* with the default Gmail design that *everything* going into a single inbox and just getting tagged… that’s a lot of email and the tendency to push things off to second and third pages is very high.
Anyway, I used the new “Quick Links” thing in Labs, to add an “Unread” shortcut that I use. I guess that sorta counts