Searching inbox AND sub-labels - possible bug

[Sam Michel]

Hello - first post, be kind ;-)

Think I've found a bug in Gmail but could equally be my knowledge of advanced search.

I'm trying to find all messages in the inbox that also have a label. The catch is that the label is a sub-label. For example, this works fine:

in:inbox label:Finance

will show me everything tagged Finance in the inbox, however this doesn't work:

in:inbox label:Projects-Some-Client

returns nothing even if there are messages with that label in the inbox. Projects is the main label with "Some Client" nested underneath.

Anyone else figured out how to do this? Seems like it should work from everything I've read.

Thanks in advance.

Toodle Pip

Sam

[Andy]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 9:03 AM, Sam Michel <s...@chinwag.com> wrote:

​...​

in:inbox label:Finance

will show me everything tagged Finance in the inbox, however this doesn't work:

in:inbox label:Projects-Some-Client

​Searching for sub-labels usually works​ for me.

However, here's the problem.  Labels are attached to messages, and searches search for messages.  But they are displayed in Conversations.  A Conversation might appear to have more than one Label, or have a Label and be in the Inbox (Inbox is just another Label), but it's possible that there is no one message in that Conversation that has both Labels at the same time!  So a search for both Labels could turn up nothing.

In your example, perhaps only the first message has the Projects-Some-Client sub-label, and perhaps only the last message in the conversation has the Inbox label, because all the older ones were archived already.

I think there is no good way around this, except to make sure you have Filters that attach your user labels to every possible message that needs one, both incoming and outgoing.

This has nothing to do with sub-labels.  The same thing can happen with top-level labels.

Just the same, whenever I want to be certain about the exact incantation for searching for a sub-label, I click on the label itself first, which puts the correct form into the search window near the top of the screen.  Then I can copy-and-paste it somewhere else.

Andy