Every Flavour Beans

It was one of the requested features in my now almost two years old “GMail Wish List”. I wanted one click access to all of my unread emails only. There is still no such ready-made solution in GMail but I am happy that I can at least create one now, thanks to GMail’s advance search operators and the new “Quick Links” feature introduced as part of GMail Labs experimental features. Follow these five steps to create a custom link to fetch all unread emails from the GMail inbox.

1. Sign-in to your GMail account. Go to the Settings page and click on the Labs link.
   

   If it is visible, you can also click the green funnel like icon sitting just to the left of “Settings” link(it is not visible when no GMail Labs feature is selected).
   

   (If these links are not there, then you have to first enable the GMail Labs feature for your GMail account. Look for a link at the top-right corner of your GMail inbox page to do so.)

2. On the Labs settings page, enable the “Quick Links” feature, which should be the first feature listed on the page.
   
3. Now enter the text “in:inbox is:unread” into GMail search box as shown in the below screenshot, and click the “Search Mail” button(or press ENTER).
   
4. Find the “Quick Links” box in the left sidebar(should be somewhere below the “Contacts” and “Labels” boxes) and click the “Add Quick Link” link in it.
   
5. Enter some readable text for this custom link as shown in the screenshot below.
   
6. Your custom link is piping hot and ready now.
   

Just click on it whenever you want to load all the unread messages in your inbox. Alas there is no way to just drag this “Quick Links” block and place it at the top of the GMail page.

You can similarly create custom links using other search operators; refer to GMail help for more advanced search operators. These search operators can also be used to create filters and label the messages.