Finding Emails without Labels in Gmail/Gapps

Being able to find emails that do not currently have labels is a feature that has been requested a number of times and for me would be very very nice. On some of my accounts I have gone through and setup filters for absolutely every type of email I get, but those accounts get less random email. The email coming in is more predictable like friends or certain mailing lists. For my main DIGITAL39 account I get a lot of random email, and a lot of predictable email. I am also using it to archive email from accounts I no longer have. So I looked at my email today and I found out that 4370 out of 8735 (remember these are threaded so it is actually a lot more email) were not labeled. You could go through all of the email and move all of the ones without labels to another label called _FILTER_ or something with a symbol in the front so it will be at the top of the labels list. However there is a better way, which still takes time, but nearly as much.

Create a new label “..filter..” and go into “All Mail”. Click the “All” link to select all of the email and then click the link to select all of the emails in “All Mail”. Label all of the emails with the new “..filter..” label. Once all of that has been done, go down through your existing labels and select all emails and remove the “..filter..” label. After you go through all of these steps you will be able to click on the “..filter..” label and see only email that does not currently have a label.

This doesn’t help for new email coming in, but it will allow you to setup filters for email that has not been filtered or labeled yet. You can easily label incoming mail with this label to make sure you catch new email. One account that I have that has thousands and thousands of emails I have done this with and there is only 1 or 2 emails a week that slip through without a filter.