Gmail is all about labels and search , not folders — and alongside the custom labels you may name and color yourself , there are several secret ones built into Gmail to help keep your messages organise and prioritise . Here are the ones you need to know about , and how you may use them .
The basics
need to see everything in your inbox you have n’t got around to yet ? case is : unread in the search box . Use in : post to see everything you ’ve charge or in : junk e-mail to see junk e-mail message without needing to penetrate through these category in the navigation dialog box on the left .
View deleted emails with in : trash and your Hangouts conversations ( if you ’ve logged them ) with in : chats . Meanwhile in : drafts will fetch up all your drafts and in : inbox gets you back to the emails presently sitting in your inbox ( anything that has n’t been file away ) .
Searching cc : me will get you all the emails you ’ve been cc’d in on while in : anywhere is handy if you need to search absolutely everything in Gmail at once ( include the junk e-mail and trash folders ) . To see every unlabeled email , put has : nouserlabels in the search boxful .
Of naturally you may combine any of these labels with other lookup terms — such as recording label : work is : unread or is : unread before:2025-04-13 . Or use something like in : institutionalize taco to find all the substance you ’ve charge about greaser - related topic , for example .
Putting a minus sign in front of a search reverses it — for good example , utilise -is : unread to show everything that has been read . It can sometimes help you find email outside of a special label or that do n’t let in a finical search term or e-mail name and address .
Email importance and categories
Gmail test to do its ripe at deciding which emails are significant and which are n’t as they make their way into your inbox — you may see this denoted with the little chicken ikon to the left of each subject header . Use is : important to find all of these messages instantly .
also is : insignificant ( or -is : important ) will do the inverse hunting ( note that if you ’re using Gmail ’s nonpayment conversation view , some threads might contain both important and unimportant emails and appear in both of these searches ) .
As before , you may develop these queries to dig deep into your inbox — is : unread is : important is a good one for rise high - priority messages that you have n’t got round to yet . Any lookup keywords ( or to : and from : operators ) can be tot too .
Gmail also assort your email into categories as it make it , as you ’ll seeif you have the tab dividers activeat the top of the inbox , and you may use class : followed by societal , principal , update , forums or promotions to get at the subject matter you ’re after .
you’re able to tap into your Google+ circles too — search for has : circle to recover all the message to or from people who ’ve been added to your circles . you’re able to use the same thaumaturgy but with a specific circle name — so circle : friends for instance — to narrow down the filter further .
Starred messages, attachments and muted emails
Starred messages get their own labels and can be really useful if you ’ve added several types of asterisk ( via the General tab in Gmail ’s options ) . The obvious place to start is is : starred , which prove all of the messages with any kind of star impound to them .
Each item-by-item star has its own label too . Use has : followed by jaundiced - star , red - star , orange - star , green - star , blue - star , purple - star , red - bang , orange - guillemet , yellow-bellied - bang , green - bridle , aristocratical - information or over-embellished - question to find the relevant emails .
If you guess you might have muted some useful conversations and subsequently block all about them then is : muted is a useful shortcut to have . If you need to start set about notifications for the thread again then simply remove the subdued recording label from the top .
Finally there ’s has : attachment , a concealed label for all those emails ( incoming and outgoing ) with one or more attachment . Whether you want to brighten some space in your inbox or find last month ’s performance report it ’s a practiced one to have available .
With all those cover label and search at your electric pig you should find yourself zooming around your inbox like never before . commend too that all of these Gmail searches can be bookmarked in your web web browser and reloaded whenever they ’re needed .
[ Header image : Alexey Boldin / Shutterstock.com ]
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