Viewing only unread messages in Gmail
I have one minor gripe with Gmail, and that is that there is no obvious way to show only unread messages. The reason this annoys me is that over the course of a week I will skip many messages that I don’t need to read or know what I need to do with them, whilst reading others, which leaves an inbox with unread messages scattered over many pages…I then eventually get around to cleaning up the unread messages but have to spend far too long doing so.
The good news is that thanks to Ozzie, I have found out that, even though it’s not obvious or seemingly documented, it is possible to show only unread messages through the search function in Gmail by searching for:
is:unread
Even better, now that Gmail’s search produces usable URLs instead of long strings of gibberish, it’s possible to bookmark a link to the unread messages view:
http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/is%3Aunread
It should be possible to narrow the search to a particular place such as the inbox or a label with an extra argument or two. Of course you will have to be logged in to Gmail prior to clicking the link for it to work…now if only there was a way to save archaic searches in Gmail rather than having to bookmark them.
Samuel
February 22nd, 2008 at 08:43am