How to Show Only Unread Messages in Primary Gmail Tab?

This is a small trick I learned the hard way. When working through the massive amounts of emails, I often wondered: how to get only the unread ones in Gmail that are also in the primary tab?

Queries like these happen quite frequently when working with Gmail. As it turns out, there’s a simple solution:

Simply type the following command in your search bar:

in: category:primary is:unread

For coders, this is an easily understandable filter operation. We want to retrieve all emails from your inbox (in:) that are also in your primary tab (category:primary) and that are also unread (is:unread).

As it turns out, Gmail comes with powerful filtering options even way beyond what you’ve seen here. Here are all the search and filtering operators in Gmail (screenshot from this source):

Simply bookmark this page and come back if you run into the next Gmail search issue.

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