-l:^i l:^u

Isn't that the strangest blog message title you have ever seen? Is this some sort of surrealistic ASCII-art? An emoticon for 'confusion'?

Don't worry. It's just a collection for add-ons in the search query you can use in Gmail t help you find even more specific messages. Together they help you find all messages that are not in your inbox but have not yet been read.

You can try this at home safely. Just use l: for 'find all messages that...' and -l: for 'skip all messages that...' Then add one of these codes:

^u -> are 'unread'
^i -> are in my inbox
^b -> are chats
^f -> have been sent
^k -> are in my trash
^r -> are still drafts
^s -> are spam
^t -> are starred