How to filter by unread in Gmail

Step
1

Log into your Gmail account

The first step is simple, simply log into your chosen Gmail account.

Step
2

Click on the search bar

Unfortunately, there’s seemingly no visible button that will filter your emails by the unread status. But there is an easy alternative option. To start, click the search bar right at the top of the page.

Step
3

Type in is:unread and click enter

In the space bar, type in “is:unread” but without the quotation marks. Then click enter.

Step
4

Filter down even further via Advanced Search

Now every single unread email should appear in your inbox, filtering out messages you’ve already clicked on. That may not be too helpful if your inbox is already stuffed with hundreds of unread emails. Fortunately, you can filter down your emails even further.

You can either hit one of the shortcuts such as ‘From’, ‘Has attachment’ and ‘Exclude Promotion’, or make a more specific filter by clicking ‘Advanced search’ highlighted in blue on the right side.

Step
5

Fill out your filter

You’ll then be given the option to narrow down your filter by sender/recipient name, keywords from the subject or email’s body copy, or even the time frame of when the email was sent.

For our example, we entered in both the Subject and ‘Has the words’ fields.

Step
6

Click search

Once all of your designed filters are completed, click the blue search box in the bottom-right corner.

As you can see in our example, Gmail was able to filter down all 707 unread emails to the exact message we needed.