You can do searches that exclude certain labels. That is, searches like this will do what you expect: (label:MyLabel1 AND NOT label:inbox AND NOT label:MyBadLabel1) That search will show you only messages that: Do have MyLabel1 And do not have label inbox And do not have label MyBadLabel1 The tricks are: to get yourself out of conversation mode! (As @Ruben says above.) to use UPPER CASE for the logic operators (AND NOT will work, and not won't) If you leave "conversation mode" on, you will get confusing results. For example, doing that search above (with conversation mode on), will likely return messages that do NOT match your search. It may be a bit weird. Here's the deal: Conversations are collections of messages that all have the same Subject. When "conversation mode" is on, searches return entire conversations as results. So what should gmail search do if a conversation contains both a message that matches, and a message that does not match your search? You are probably expecting it to return conversations only if all messages in that conversation match. But that is not correct. Instead, Gmail search will return conversations even if only a single message in that conversation matches. So that means that if you do the same search above with "conversation mode" on, the results are likely to include messages that do not match your search!