Find all unread messages in Gmail

If you're like me, you probably have a few messages lurking in your Gmail Archive that you forgot to read. These are the wayward emails which you never read and never labelled. (All unread messages that are labelled are counted and listed next to each label.) The lefthand Gmail sidebar will not display the number of unread messages for All Mail, however, so you need some way of uncovering unlabelled, unread messages.

To uncover these hidden archived messages, simply search "is:unread" in the top Gmail search field.



You'll be presented with every single unread mail that is stored on your personal Gmail server. You can also perform this search by clicking "Show search options" to the right of the search field and selecting Unread Mail in the dropdown box on the next page. Then click search and you're again presented with all of your unread mail.

For a full list of Gmail operators, see Gmail's Advanced Search Operators.