Managing your emails in Gmail can be a hassle, especially if you receive a lot of messages each day. If you have a busy schedule, unread emails can quickly pile up, even if you intend to read them later.
If you’ve ever let your inbox fill way up and struggled to find certain unread messages, hopefully this blog post will help you breathe a little easier because Gmail offers several ways to sort through unread messages and organize your emails more strategically.
Read on to learn how to find unread emails in Gmail and better optimize your inbox.
Set up an inbox that separates unread and read emails
You can filter all unread messages by setting up your inbox to prioritize — and set apart — any unread emails in your list of messages.
With this view, you’d really have to try to lose any unread emails. If you toggle on this view in your settings (more on that in a moment!), your inbox will be rearranged to have unread messages appear first, with read emails displayed underneath based on the date they were received.
If you’re not quite ready for this kind of separation yet, know that Gmail’s Mark as unread option is always available for emails that you read, but want to be sure you revisit by marking them as unopened.
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Step-by-step: How to organize your Gmail inbox by read and unread emails
Launch your preferred internet browser, and open Gmail.
Sign in if you need to.
Click the Settings button, a gear icon in the top right corner.
Select See all settings.
Click to the Inbox tab.
Scroll to the Inbox type row, and change it to Unread first.
Adjusting your settings isn’t the only way to see all of your unread emails in one spot. You can also use the search bar on Gmail to filter out your unread messages. As long as you remember who sent the email you’re searching for, or the keywords in the subject line, you can type “is:unread,” followed by some details, and the email you’re looking for should appear.
Many people will add the sender or other keywords after “is:unread” to narrow their results. To really dig deep, you can click on the three-slider icon on the upper right-hand side of your search bar and open Gmail’s Advanced Search. With an advanced search, you can pick from several search criteria, such as a search by date or whether or not an email has attachments.
You can also filter your emails by using Gmail labels, which is Gmail’s version of folders, to group emails easily and keep them better organized. If, for example, you regularly receive analytics reports from Google, and you want to keep them to read later, you can select these emails as soon as they reach your inbox and drag them to a Reports label in your sidebar — or you can just create a filter (which is a rule) that knows to send those analytics reports to the Reports label.
Whenever you’re ready to access those unread report emails, you simply click on the Reports label to see all of those emails gathered as though by magic. To further filter for unread messages within a label, click the label and select the toggle box that says “Unread.”
Learning how to find unread emails in Gmail and organize them well is just the beginning of inbox excellence. If you’re looking to up your game even further, you need Streak. Streak is a Chrome extension for Gmail that can show you exactly when (and where in the world) every email you send is read using Streak email tracking.
Email tracking isn’t all Streak does, though. You can:
Just click the Unread Mail filter located on the upper left-hand portion of your screen. If you want to select all unread emails, click Select > Select All. You can also sort your unread messages by Newest on Top or Oldest on Top.
To mark all unread emails as read in Gmail, just use the Gmail Advanced Search bar and type “is:unread.” Select all the messages you find, then click Mark as read.
To delete all unread emails, select all unread emails from a label or filter, or type “is:unread” into the search bar and click Select all. Then, just click the trash can icon to Delete all selected emails.