Comments on: Gmail Tip: Finding Unread Emails

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:47:07 +0000

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

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:52:52 +0000

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?

By: Reinaldo

Reinaldo — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:49:46 +0000

I commonly use: l:^u

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:31:47 +0000

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.

By: Zack

Zack — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:51:52 +0000

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.

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:23:03 +0000

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

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:21:09 +0000

Want to save 3 characters? Use “is:unread”.