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.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Thats a damn good idea. I was trying to find a way to do this easily without using that gmail plugin for firefox that does it for you. I didnt like the way it worked for some reason. I dont remember now, but it was basically saying “Not this label, Not this label…” until you were left with only the ones without labels. For some reason i remember it missed a crap load. Anyway, good idea.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
another way is to use the “-label:xxx” search tag, e.g. do a full search that excludes all current labels (just do it once and save the string).
October 28th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
That is another way, but it depends on how many labels you have. Most of my accounts have more labels than I want to put in a search box. The account for this domain has over 50 labels. If you only have 10-20 it would be a fine way of weeding out the emails.