Filtering tagged and untagged Gmail messages

Question

I am currently switching over to using "tagged" Gmail addresses - for example, using name+amazon@gmail.com for my Amazon email, name+newegg@gmail.com for my Newegg account, etc. However, because I am sure I won't remember to change all of my existing email subscriptions, I want automatically to label all emails with a "uncategorized" label for further sorting. When I create a filter for just name@gmail.com, all of my emails show up, and since + is a reserved symbol I can't just search for that. Regex also does not seem to work.

I am trying to create filters for emails without tags (ex: name@gmail.com). Simply searching for name@gmail.com does not work as it returns all emails received.

Has anyone else had/fixed this problem?

Answer 1

What you want to do is search for email without labels (tags as you call them).

For this you need to search for "-label(yourlabel1 OR yourlabel2 ... OR yourlabelX OR sent)", where yourlabelX are the names of your current labels.

I created a search and saved it to my Gmail using the Quicklinks Labs item.

Answer 2

As others have noted you cannot search for the lack of the tag. The reason why seems to be that the plus sign is generally treated as an "and" in the search. Unless you wrap the address in a quoted string (like what JMin has suggested) but then you need to supply the full email address.

A hackish work around involves the solutions suggested by both JMin and intlect. Create a filter that looks for any of the tagged addresses and apply a label to it. I'd suggest something like Z so it is filtered to the end of the label list and is short, but it's really up to you. Once the filter is in place, you can now do a search of -label:Z. You can add individual labels for each tag, but your search for uncategorized emails would have to keep changing, plus you need to keep adding new filters rather than updating the one. If you make use of Quick Links, you can save the search for easy reference.

Answer 3

I'm not sure about what you're trying to accomplish here.

• If you want to create a filter for an address with a + try putting it within quotes (i.e. "name+tag@gmail.com")

• If you're trying to filter for all emails sent to name@gmail.com excluding all name+tag@gmail.com you can do it by putting "name@gmail.com" (as shown, within quotes) in your filter.