There are numerous reports of issues with Gmail labels, stars, unreads, message counts, and generally searching or counting combinations of these. Many of these seem to come from a common cause.I understand that Google has obscurely documented that: despite showing labels as if they belong to the conversation, they actually belong to individual messages. And I understand that new messages appended to an existing conversation do not inherit any of the labels previously used in that conversation. Two things could solve this, as I see it so far:Make sure new messages in a conversation automatically inherit user labels from the conversation.Work around this so that at least I can review conversations for which search criteria applies to conversations as if they had the labels and stars and unread statuses of their constituent messages. Main question:What is a step-by-step workflow that ordinary Gmail users can use to work around this issue? Workflow examples might include, but are not limited to:Per-message or per-conversation handling / command sequencesInstallation and running of automated maintenance scriptsNon-standard (non-intuitive) search queriesDaily/Weekly (i.e. periodic) handling or proceduresCreative uses of filtersLabs features...Other informationEasily reproduce the issue yourselfSend a test message to yourself.Open that new unread conversation that only has one message in it.Label that conversation with a new label mylabel. Then go back to inbox.Search for is:starred label:mylabel and verify that nothing shows up because nothing is starred.Open the test conversation. Reply to that message and send. Then go back to the inbox.Open that test conversation and click a star on this second message in the conversation. Then go back to the inbox.We verify that there is a conversation that has a star and has the label mylabel.Search the same search before (is:starred label:mylabel). We expect to find the test conversation there because it is both starred and has the mylabel label.BUG: No conversations show up.But I'm still interested in finding the starred conversations that have that label.List of documented cases and discussionsA blog post discussion. Also lifehacker.StackOverflow.Unread countsMore unread countsInconsistent labeling
How do I work around labels being applied to individual messages and not conversations in Gmail?
gmail;gmail labels