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Say I have the label Home/Family/Kids and Home/Family, is there any search expression that can match both of these with a single term? For example, I want to use a search query like label:Home/Family*.

Note that using Home/Family/Kids OR Home/Family is not a good solution since I have many labels and this wouldn't be practical.

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No wildcard searching in gmail has long been a major issue. I don't think you have any hope until this is solved. The OR operator is the only workaround, and not a good one. Being Google I'd almost expect regular expressions to work, but they don't. – drye Jul 9 '10 at 19:46
they do for filters just not the label parameter – phwd♦ Jul 10 '10 at 12:57
@phwd: I'm guessing you're referring to this answer. Have you been able to get it to work? As far as I can tell it doesn't actually support regexes and instead strips out punctuation and performs a match. (See the comments on that answer for more information.) – Senseful Jul 10 '10 at 21:47
yea you are right I starting testing with and without the punctuation and it seems to give the same result. I will have to sit down and look it properly tonight – phwd♦ Jul 10 '10 at 22:50

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Using the complex OR is annoying, but being the only workaround I suggest you use it with the combination of the Quick Links Lab feature.

Quick Links by Dan P

Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.more.

You will be able to save the complex searches and recall them when needed.

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up vote 1 down vote

You can apply multiple labels to an email. So, you could have the labels Home, Kids, and Pets. Emails regarding your kids could have Home and Kids. Emails regarding your pets could have Home and Pets. Then you could do a search for label:Home. Not exactly what you want, but it works.

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This might work with filters, I'll give it a try, thanks. – Senseful Jul 9 '10 at 18:40
Nope, it doesn't work :( ... I specifically need it to be hierarchical though, so tagging as multiple labels is not an option for me. – Senseful Jul 9 '10 at 18:44
Oh. That's all I got, sorry! – Rebecca Chernoff Jul 9 '10 at 18:55

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