I have just done a cleanup of my Gmail inbox. For the first time it’s showing “2 Unread Messages” and
not “100+ Unread Messages“.
How do I feel? Feel like I had a haircut after 6 months, no no, feel like I just shaved my head ;) Yeah it’s that good to see so few unread messages in my Gmail.
Two little Gmail search strings and a lot of courage helped me to achieve this result. A lot of courage – because some of the emails I intentionally marked “unread” so that I could reply to them when I have a spare time. But the spare time somehow never came ;) and by now, it was too late to reply to them anyway.
As for the two little search strings, they were:
- is:unread for listing unread messages. 2) in:inbox for listing messages in inbox
Used together as is:unread in:inbox in the search field, it will list all the unread emails in your inbox.
Other Useful Search Strings
Here are some of the other useful gmail search strings that you can use:
- Emails from particular sender
from:ades or from:ades@adesblog.com – so you can use either the sender’s name or email. - Search for emails in particular label
in:label – just like above I used “in:inbox”, you can search for emails with any other labels. - Emails CC’ed or BCC’ed to someone
cc:arstan – it will search for emails that were CC’ed to Arstan. (Similarly you can use bcc:arstan). - Search for chat messages
is:chat – is:chat advertise – it will look for any chat message that contains the word “advertise” in it. - Emails that are read, unread and starred
is:read – is:unread – is:starred – it will search for emails that are read, unread and starred respectively. Please note that you can combine more than one search string. Eg; is:starred is:unread from:ades - Emails with specific subject title
subject:adsense – finds emails with a word “adsense” in their subject.
subject:(google adsense) – finds emails in which the subject contains both the word “google” AND “adsense”.
subject:”google adsense” – finds emails in which the subject contains a phrase “google adsense” in them. Phrases like “adsense google” or “google has adsense” won’t be found. - Emails that contain attachment
has:attachment – search for messages with an attachment. Eg; from:ades has:attachment - Emails with specific attachment
filename:fonts.zip – search for messages that has attachment fonts.zip.
Memorize the above search strings and you will never lose an email in your Gmail ever again! Hope you find it useful.
Exactly, it’s a good feeling to have empty inbox.
Is there an equivalent for searching Google Reader items. I have several hundred feeds and would like to be able to search by keyword only for unread items, so that today I could dig out all the stories on GMail for instance…
great way to start a new day… with a clean inbox. congratulations. can be quite difficult to do.
great trick..i did not know that….i have thousands of unread..haha
I know the feeling. Whenever I’m away for just a few days, I’m always back trying to battle my way through what seems like an endless stream of junk mail.
It’s ridiculous how “A.D.D.” I am with my inbox. I’m not like that in normal life, but anything left in my inbox after a day just really bothers me. It’s nice to see it clean as a whistle! ;)
Great article, keep it up. I found you guys via the new website indexing service over at http://www.dignova.com
Grtz,
Michael
My unread emails give me nightmares but thanks to this trick i can sleep again.
Thanks
Jason
Useful tips indeed. It is hard to imagine if there is no gmail for me.
Gmail has so many great features but there are one or two that make it less user friendly.
Grouping mails by subject does keep things tidier but I would prefer to do that by contacts instead. When you did your clean up, how did you deal with that – I mean, what say you wanted part of a conversation but not all of it?
PS3, no I just wanted to make all the unread messages read or delete them altogether.
I didn’t know about some of these. Thanks for the great tips.
Another useful search in Gmail is searching before or after a certain date. Just enter this text:
before:date (date is in this format: yyyy/mm/dd)
after:date
For example: before 2007/12/24
Inbox zero! Woohoo!
The thing I like most about Gmail is the search ability. You don’t even have to type “from:” to reliably find emails from a certain person. Just type the first part of their email address. If the address is “bob123@domain.com”, just type “bob123″ in the search box. It will get 99% of what you need in a flash.
I love Gmail, thanks for this tips..
Wow, this is a very thoughtful feature they have added on Gmail. It’s great, because it’s quite annoying when you always find large number of unread messages in you inbox and you end up not reading your latest mail too. It just clogs up everything.
really useful information, I always use gmail for my free email…I will try the facilities…thanks
My inbox fills up every day, 100 relevant emails, 400 spam :( Every day!
YourDownline.co.uk, I have never had that experience with Gmail. Gmail catches most spam. If you are marking messages as spam and you continue to get spam, you might consider more serious preventative measures like blocking email from certain country-level domains, messages with spammy words (like “viagra”), or getting anti-spam software.
Nice, thank you so much.
Makes finding 2 unread messages from 100s of emails in your inbox alot easier.
very useful for me I have 16k unreads :)
Great way to make sure no mail is lost. I had never thought of this until I read this post. It has really been of help.
Thanks for these useful tips. I’ve always had trouble keeping my Gmail quota within the limits due to the number of email lists that I’m subscribed to, but hardly even read.
Nowadays I’ve got into the habit of selecting (using ‘shift’ click to select those in between) and deleting all the ‘junk’ that comes in each day before it gets the chance to build up.
This may be a useful word for those who are members of mailing lists: “unsubscribe” – this would very rarely appear in private or important messages and could save a lot of time in searching for junk.
I wish Gmail would add a “sort by sender” option as in Outlook etc.