Show only email that arrived within the last X minutes

Question

Confirmation emails are sometimes required for signing up for a webpage or sometimes just for logging into a page with 2FA. I don't want to see any other emails, rather than the specific email, that I opened Gmail for, because they could distract me from what I actually wanted to do in the first place.

So I want Gmail to only show me emails, that arrived within a couple of minutes from 'right now'to minimize potential distractions. How can I do this within Gmail?

I was thinking, I could use a link to search my inbox with a specific filter, maybe?

Answer 1

It appears you can specify the number of hours:

To only show a portion of your email use multiple unboxes.

• To turn it on go to gear->settings.
• then to advanced
• select multiple inboxes.

that should give you a new settings tab.

You can then specify one of the new inboxes to show items newer than 1 hour. newer_than:1h

if you tell it to put the new inbox above the main inbox then the new items will be in a separate inbox above the rest.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, Gmail's search operators based on time only go down to the day, not any smaller.

You can, however, search for things that are newer than a day and that will get you most of the way there.

newer_than:1d

You can, of course, add whatever other search terms you need.

You can't do this as a filter. Filters kick off when the message comes in, and a filter like that will match everything. You can, however, create a link with that operator embedded in the URL.