How do I exclude people from a Gmail search?

QI use labels in Gmail to help sort my email, based on various club memberships and associations. When I need to search for emails, I can type things like ‘bridge club’ to narrow what I’m looking for. Recently, I was struggling to find a particular email because the relevant words were common English, so they appeared in many messages and multiple labels. It occurred to me that it’d be very useful to exclude some labels from my search, but I have no idea how to do this or even if it’s possible. Can you help me? Helen Prentiss

AWe certainly can. There are loads of different search operators that you can use in Gmail to narrow your search, one of which is the type label followed by whatever label you have in mind. To search for messages with the ‘Bridge Club’ label, for example, you’d type your search term followed by the label bridge club. Adding a minus (‘-’) symbol to the start of the label operator will exclude emails tagged with that label — so you’d type -label: bridge club (see screenshot).

As mentioned, there are very many more operators and, from what you say, we reckon you’d benefit from memorising a few more of them. You’ll find Google’s full list and examples at www.snipca.com/23655.