How to filter only emails without aliases

Question

I have been using Gmail for a while and created a bunch of aliases for different mailing lists and websites, with "[email protected]"

I am currently switching to another email provider for my personal email and keeping Gmail for mailing lists. Since several of my contacts still have my Gmail address only and might still send me messages, I would like to transfer the emails sent to "[email protected]" (without the alias) to my new account.

I created the following filter in Gmail:

to:[email protected]
forward it 

But this filter still takes into account the messages sent to [email protected]

I also tried with "deliveredto", "hasnouserlabel" but no luck. Is it possible to create such a filter?

Answer 1

Search incoming messages while excluding plus address aliases

You can search for messages sent to your Gmail address, [email protected], while excluding plus address aliases such as [email protected] using either of the following two approaches.

Option 1. Quote entire address

Use an exact phrase search by quoting the email address but replace the @ symbol by a space or almost any punctuation character such as ! , . + etc.

For example:

to:"name.firstname gmail.com"

Note: You can actually leave the @ symbol in as long as you insert an additional space or special character.

For example

to:"name.firstname @gmail.com"

Option 2. Quote the name portion

Use an exact phrase search for the account name portion only while leaving the @ symbol and domain portion outside the quotation marks but still attached. Do not add any spaces or punctuation between the two terms or inside the quotes.

For example,

to:"name.firstname"@gmail.com

Answer 2

Quoting the part before @ filters only the exact address without aliases:

ie. from:("exact.address"@domain.com)

source

Answer 3

I found that the AROUND operator works quite well for this--from Google:

Find messages with words near each other. Use the number to say how many words apart the words can be

Add quotes to find messages in which the word you put first stays first.

AROUND

Example: holiday AROUND 10 vacation

Example: "secret AROUND 25 birthday"

I used johndoe AROUND 0 gmail to find only instances of johndoe@gmail while filtering out any aliases popping up in between. The inverse (-"johndoe AROUND 0 gmail) also works well if you are interested in having any alias emails skip your inbox.