How can I exclude a given label from a search, effectively finding all the email that do not have that label applied? I've searched Google, SuperUser, and the Gmail Advanced search support page to no avail.
Here are the searches I've tried, none of which work:
!label:work
NOT label:work
not label:work
-label:work
The reason this may not be a duplicate: After some more experimentation it seems that the -
operator would work, except that it doesn't exclude entire conversations if any one message in the conversation has the label. I need my search to exclude any conversation in which one or more messages has the specified label.
How can I achieve this behavior?
Per Gianni Di Noia's advice, I tried making a filter that matches emails labeled
work
and then re-applies the label work
. Unfortunately, after some testing with another email account I have I found that this does not work because it is never triggered. Filters are triggered based on the properties of the incoming email, not on the conversation to which Gmail assigns that email. Google warned me of this even before I did my testing:
-label:
operator work exactly as you want.work
is properly excluded until someone replies to the thread, at which time I have to retag the conversation, even though it still looks like it's tagged, in order for it to again be excluded from the search.work
and then apply labelwork
?