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

I couldn't figure out a single filter but you may just want to write out every alias?

-to:(+bills OR +offers OR +deals)

Answer 2

Use an exact phrase search without the @ symbol:

to:"name.firstname gmail.com"

I assume gmail handles @ as a special case and prepends a wildcard. By dropping the at symbol and adding quotes, it searches for that exact phrase. Thus, your filter will only target emails without an alias.

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.