gmail Unlabelled

5th December 2005, 02:33:50

gmailUnlabelled is a greasemonkey script that creates a special label ‘Unlabelled’ to search for all the conversations without a real label.

Why?

Gmail doesn’t provide a search to search for unlabelled conversations. This is quite handy if you like to keep all emails labelled and have forgotten to label some.

Where?

Install greasemonkey, then, right-click gmailUnlabelled to install. If you’re on the new version of install gmailUnlabelled2.

Tips, Tricks and Gotchas!

1. The search string can’t be formed when the label box is collapsed.
2. If the search throws up ‘conversations’ (threads) with labels, it could be because of two reasons -
   1. The ‘conversation’ has atleast one email without a label - Gmail groups emails into conversations but labels are applied to each individual email. So if a conversation has even one email without a label, it will show up in the search results. Most people will run into this issue if they’ve been using gmail for a while. (See update dated 3rd August 2007 below).
   2. The label has some special characters that gmailUnlabelled can’t handle. Please report this.
3. Firefox only of course! IE users click here.

Update (15th June 2006)

Script updated to work with some recent changes. Also, from this version one could search for ‘-label‘ to find all unlabelled emails in gmail.

Update (3rd August 2007)

If you’ve been a gmail user for a while, the first time you use gmailUnlabelled could be confusing as it’d probably throw up conversations that apparently have email. Select all such conversations and attach a dummy label (’old’ or ‘read’). Now you’re ready for gmailUnlabelled. Use it often and its easier to keep all emails labelled. In a couple of days, you’d also figure out why the dummy label was necessary. ;-)

Update (13th November 2007)

gmailUnlabelled does not work with “gmail 2.0″. I will work on an update ASAP.

Gmail 2.0 update (16th November 2007)

If you’re on the new version of gmail a.k.a. “gmail 2.0″ (Nov 2007), use the new script - gmailUnlabelled2.

Update (8th Febuary 2008)

Google just tweaked the interface which broke the script (again!). I’ve now updated it.

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28 Responses to “gmail Unlabelled”

1. On March 16th, 2006 at 21:01:43, Louis said:

   Hi,
   thx for your work, but your script does not seems to work on my gmail.
   I just not see the “Unlabelled” label.
   Can you help me?

2. On April 2nd, 2006 at 19:34:10, Vishal said:

   Hi,

   I have the same problem. I can’t see the “Unlabelled” label either… :-(

   Thanks,

   -Vishal

3. On April 3rd, 2006 at 10:26:20, Vishal said:

   A Correction,

   I see the “Unlabelled” now, but it was not visible earlier.

   Thanks,

   -Vishal

4. On October 16th, 2006 at 04:17:44, Emre said:

   hi
   i am searching one script but i didnt find it yet.
   may be you can use my idea.

   i want to seach my email without attachments..
   and i didnt find the way yet.

   can it be idea for you ?

5. On October 16th, 2006 at 08:15:43, Jaidev said:

   Emre, gmail already has search based on attachments. Use has:attachment to search for mails that have an attachment or -has:attachment to find the ones that don’t have an attachment.

6. On November 21st, 2006 at 01:33:09, Helmut said:

   doesn’t seem to work. i have thousands of conversations, 88 labels, and when I click on “Unlabelled” it returns “hundreds” of conversations (20 pages of up to 20 conversations), all of which have one or more labels…

   I just want to make sure I didn’t forget conversations to put labels on, because I have so many.

7. On November 21st, 2006 at 07:38:19, Jaidev said:

   Helmut,

   See the gotchas in the post. Some of the emails in each of those conversations don’t have a label.

   Yes, each *email* needs to have a label as opposed to each conversation.

8. On December 12th, 2006 at 14:31:18, Mark said:

   Can see ‘unlabelled’ but doesn’t work: consistently returned error 600. Also, you don’t state that your security code is case-sensitive. Also, spelling mistake in first paragraph at top of web page: ‘converstions’.

9. On January 11th, 2007 at 00:33:16, Stu said:

   Some of my labels have a space in there name. This script puts a hyphen in the space and those labels aren’t excluded. Any fix to the script? I don’t want to change my labels.

   Thanks.

10. On January 11th, 2007 at 11:28:36, Jaidev said:

    Stu,

    The hyphen is required to search for labels with special characters in gmail. Click on one of your regular labels (with spaces) and you’ll see what I mean.

    What you’re experiencing is the bulleted point 2a I make in the gotchas.

11. On August 18th, 2007 at 18:05:41, Steven said:

    This script does not appear to work with folders4gmail…

    Too bad, because both are included in bettergmail.

12. On August 19th, 2007 at 09:21:39, Jaidev said:

    Yeah Steven, the script reads the list of labels off the standard gmail interface, since folders4gmail rearranges the labels, gmailUnlabelled wouldn’t work.

13. On August 22nd, 2007 at 09:14:56, Robert said:

    Try this search string which I have created

    -(label:LABEL1 OR label:LABEL2 OR …)

    It will give you all unlabeled messages. My testing has returned some false positives though.

14. On November 4th, 2007 at 18:38:01, Bob Howard said:

    I consistently get error 600.
    Search box looks good, lots of ‘-Label:MyLabel’
    Thanks.

15. On November 13th, 2007 at 20:43:55, Sue said:

    Love your script, but it doesn’t seem to work with the new Gmail. Will you be updating it for Gmail 2?

16. On November 14th, 2007 at 07:55:42, Jaidev said:

    Yup, I’ll work on an update ASAP, it doesn’t seem a trivial fix, gmail changed a lot.

17. On November 23rd, 2007 at 17:11:00, dsjkvf said:

    is it possible somehow to make your very helpful script work with Gmail Macros?

    thank you.

18. On November 24th, 2007 at 01:08:22, Jaidev said:

    Do you mean add a keyboard shortcut?

    Otherwise it doesn’t have any compatibility issues and works with gmail macros. I use both of them myself.

19. On November 24th, 2007 at 13:30:06, dsjkvf said:

    yes, i’ve meant a keyboard shortcut. or something like pressing Gmail Macros’ ‘g’ for ‘go to the label’ menu and then putting there ‘unlabelled’.

20. On November 28th, 2007 at 21:50:01, Jeff Bristow said:

    I am consistently getting an error 600 when using this. I have removed all spaces from my labels and all ’special characters’. I have 74 labels, so I don’t know if it is an issue of too many labels or if the search string is not being created properly.

21. On February 1st, 2008 at 02:25:57, James said:

    Hi, I keep getting the error “Oops, encountered a problem (#102)”. Any idea what causes this?

22. On February 8th, 2008 at 10:53:05, Richard Winskill said:

    I keep getting the error, too. I’m guessing, since it used to work fine, that it’s because of Google’s recent reworking of the way the GMail page works: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/gmailgreasemonkey-api-issue.html

23. On February 8th, 2008 at 11:23:24, Jaidev said:

    Google just changed their interface again. I’ve updated the script.

24. On April 13th, 2008 at 02:19:10, X4lldux said:

    When a label contains parentheses “(” or “)” script doesn’t escape it correctly. It should change’em to “-”.

25. On June 11th, 2008 at 04:35:34, manipul said:

    Cannot load it into GreseMonkey and Label “unlabelled” does not show when loaded manually. Please help. Thanks.

26. On August 13th, 2008 at 13:06:37, Nick Partridge said:

    Unlabelled has stopped working under firefox 3 when using an “own domain” mail account.

27. On August 13th, 2008 at 22:20:38, Jaidev said:

    Yup, gmail changed something yesterday, I’m looking into this …

28. On August 17th, 2008 at 10:04:08, Daed Lee said:

    The script seems to be working sporadically. The Unlabelled label will only sometimes appear when logging in. Seems like Gmail serves up a different version of the page every time. I’m using the new version of Gmail if that matters.

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