While introducing tabs, Gmail also introduced the category tag to facilitate search within tabs. So, you can use something like: category:social facebook and it will return all the emails from social tab with keyword “facebook” But unfortunately, you can not do the same with primary tab. Although, category:primary tag does exist but it does not really work when you say: category:primary is:unread This command will again return all the unread emails from all the tabs. UPDATE (on 19 August 2015): Google has lately added the feature and now the category:primary is:unread search returns only the unread emails only from primary category! Well, the solution of this problem is that we subtract all other tabs from the resultset and what remains shall be the results only from primary tab. For example, the following command will return unread emails only from primary tab. is:inbox -category:(updates OR promotions OR social OR forums) is:unread Bonus Tips: To find only read emails: is:inbox -category:(updates OR promotions OR social OR forums) is:read To find only starred emails: is:inbox -category:(updates OR promotions OR social OR forums) is:starred To find only chat conversations: is:inbox -category:(updates OR promotions OR social OR forums) is:chat To find only emails marked as important: is:inbox -category:(updates OR promotions OR social OR forums) is:important As all these are long and very geeky looking commands, I am sure that soon Google will take notice of this problem and sort it out. Until then the above commands can help quicken your email management. Let me know how you liked this tip and whether it was useful to you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!
