Feature request: an is:unreplied / “awaiting my reply” search operator for Gmail
Gmail’s search supports a rich set of operators (from:, to:, deliveredto:, is:unread, newer_than:, etc.), but there’s no way to filter by a thread’s reply state — i.e. surface only conversations where the most recent message is from someone else and I still owe a response.
Today is:unread is the closest proxy, and it’s a poor one: you can read a message and still need to reply to it, and you can have already replied to something that’s technically unread. The reliable signal — “is the latest message in this thread inbound?” — isn’t queryable.
Proposed: an operator such as is:unreplied (or awaiting:reply) that matches threads whose most recent message was not sent by the authenticated user. Ideally exposed both in the Gmail UI search box and via the Gmail API q parameter so it’s usable from scripts and agents.
I recognize this asks for thread-level semantics, whereas Gmail search is fundamentally message-level — and the Gmail API doesn’t currently support thread-wide searches the way the UI does. So this likely isn’t a trivial addition, particularly on the API side. But the “last message in the thread” signal is exactly the piece that today can only be reconstructed client-side.
Simple example: a shared address like team@example.com receives dozens of threads a day. To find which ones still need a human response, you currently either label them by hand or write code that fetches every matching thread and inspects whether its last message is inbound. A single is:unreplied query would collapse that whole loop into one search — in the UI and through the API.
Because Gmail filters are built on the same search criteria, this would also unlock auto-filters and saved searches for “awaiting reply,” not just ad-hoc lookups. It would be valuable for inbox triage, support/shared-mailbox workflows, and increasingly for agentic tools that need to identify follow-ups without pulling every thread’s full contents into context just to check who sent the last message.
Thanks,