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I'd like to do a search in my Gmail to find out the mails that I sent without reply.

I tried this, but it doesn't work:

label:sent -has:reply

it seems that the 'has' operator only accept :attachment

Is there a way to search the un-replied mails?

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6 Answers 6

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17

I don't know of a direct way to do this, but you can create a filter that marks any mail containing "Re:" with a specific label (lets say RE), and the search for -{label:RE}

alternatively, skip the labeling part and search for -{"re:"}

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  • Thanks Ophir, but if people use web gmail to reply a mail, the subject won't contain the RE or something like this.
    – Johnny
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 7:17
  • @Johnny Just tested it - it does ad a 'Re' - click the 'show details' link and it will show you the mail header.
    – Ophir Yoktan
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 7:34
  • @Ophir I see, yes the subject has the 'Re'. There is another problem, the gmail server seems to ignore the ':', which means, when I search for "Re:", it will show mails that contains "re". That would be a lot of non-reply mails.
    – Johnny
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 10:29
  • use quotes. and you can skip the tagging - just search -{"re:"}
    – Ophir Yoktan
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 10:43
  • 3
    @Ophir @Johnny I think the correct one will be -subject:"re:" to search only in the subjects of the e-mails. It still ignores the colon, so you might endup filtering out something that you don't want to.
    – Lipis
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 11:44
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I wanted to move all the mails I had sent to people and had not received a reply, into a label in Gmail. After trying different queries for an hour, I realised multiple queries would do the trick. And this worked for me.

1. Search for

in:inbox to:me category:personal

Select all conversations that match this search, and Label as: Create new Label → Replied

2. Search for

in:inbox from:me -label:replied

Select all conversations that match this search, and Label as: Create new Label → NoReplyPlusChats

3. Search for

label:NoReplyPlusChats is:chats

Select all conversations that match this search, and Remove Label NoReplyPlusChats → Apply

4. Rename Label NoReplyPlusChats to NoReply

5. Delete Label Replied

Now all your un-replied mails have the label: NoReply

(NOTE: Label NoReply would still contain your synced notes from smartphones, Apple Notes etc.)

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  • Actually, in the first step, you can skip the "in:inbox" bit, this was specific to my situation. I moved all my sent mail to inbox, so this is the only way I could send all threads without replies back to Sent Mail Folder.
    – Aravindan Ve
    Commented Jul 14, 2013 at 19:48
  • This doesn't work. I followed your steps and I still don't get my non replied emails.
    – valentt
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 15:09
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I decided to use this search operator:

from:me -subject:"re:" -is:chats -is:draft -has:userlabels

It's not perfect, but it cuts down on a lot of the conversations.

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5

Just a few years late, but I wrote a Gmail plugin to help with this. It's been pretty popular so far and is probably used by thousands of people by now. You can find instructions for it here:

It does a more sophisticated look up of who hasn't replied to your email, and you can tweak it to be even more effective to your use case.

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  • I don't know anything about Google scripting, but I think a script needs to start with a myFunction entry point. I wanted to run the script once to see whether it worked...
    – ivo Welch
    Commented May 1, 2022 at 0:24
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None of the previous answers worked for me. Searching for -subject:re and equivalents seem to match EVERY conversation. I believe this is because that search is positive for the first message in the conversation (which does not have "Re:" in the subject line).

What works for me is:

  1. Create a label (I called it "HasReply") using the filter: subject:(+re)
  2. Then search for -label:hasreply or -label:hasreply -from:me

The logic here is that the first search will find all of the conversations with a reply. The second will then exclude those - leaving the messages without replies.

Adding the -from:me addresses a corner case where I'm searching a bunch of emails, sent NOT from me, to multiple recipients, and I want to find the ones NOBODY has replied to. Without the -from:me the results will for some reason include conversations where I am the only person who has replied. Adding this would not be appropriate in answering the original question, where the person wanted to find emails he had sent (which this would exclude) and had not received a reply to.

Alas, it is still not perfect. I create and apply the filter ("to matching conversations") and all is good. Then new replies come in and they don't seem to be added to the label...so I have to go back in like I'm editing the filter and re-apply it to catch the latest messages.

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  • Why do we need the plus sign in (+re)? I read the documentation, but couldn't figure out what it means. Thanks.
    – Kartick Vaddadi
    Commented Jul 29, 2016 at 15:37
  • not really working well enough for me
    – Thieme Hennis
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 21:28
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Based on Ophir’s answer (I'm not sure if it’s possible to merge answers—I'm sure someone will pop along if neccessarily).

Filter for -subject:"re:" as mentioned—I labeled all such messages reply. (Has to be a filter because you want to label the thread not the reply.)

The search string I then had to use was:

-label:reply (from:myEmail OR from:myOtherEmail) -(variousKeyWordsThatSpecifySelfMails OR ect) -(to:myEmail OR to:myEmail)

Also—I'm afraid I'm not quite answering the OP—this will find all single emails that didn't get a reply. If someone emailed me, and I emailed back, and then there was no reply—that won't be found...

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