In gmail, I used a "keep" label to mark mail I don't want deleted. Then when I do bulk search I add "-in:keep" which lets me mark and delete the entire result-set (even if it's 100s of items) without worry.
I wish I had known this is not possible in PM before signing in for a paid account.

Examples:
in:travel before:2024-01-01 -in:keep
subject:"order" -in:keep

Its mid 2026 - how id this till not a thing - we can search inside mail but not labels? Really weird.

Absolute critical function for workflow. For example searching for the COMBINATION of the labels <mycompany> AND <invoice>.

Also, this is not possible (at least not to my knowledge) thru Thunderbird and Proton Bridge, so it's a critical overall function for workable workflow among thousands of e-mails.

Without this functionality, what's the use of labeling a mail at all...?

Tx for looking into this, and thanks for an (otherwise) excellent product!

How is this still not being considered? One of your developers said in the past (several years ago) that you already have the internal mechanisms to provide such queries (on your Reddit).

It's ridiculous. There are several features with less votes and much more recent that you've worked on (and some of them completed). This is basic email management tooling -- what you were supposed to do on the first few versions of the service.

This capability in the search and in the Sieve filters are must have features for advanced users and business!

Absolutely needed.

I just imported thousands of emails from Gmail, but find that it is almost impossible to get my inbox managed because I have no way to do even a simple search like all messages in the inbox with a particular label. For a service where it is not simple to search the message content, having robust metadata support is essential. It is likely enough to send me back to Gmail until proton mail gets its act together on this.

I moved my work email to Proton Mail because I love the label option, but it feels I'd still have to use folders as well to manage. It seems a simple thing to add, am I wrong?

Yes! We need search by tag:TAG and folder:FOLDER

Say I have a child just diagnosed with the CKM condition (Cardiac-Kidney-Metabolic).
I remember a Medscape article on it but it could be in any of the following folders: Cardio, Kidney, metabolism, Medscape, child, conditions, and so on. Finding this email would allow me to open an important discussion with the medical specialist.

I have built an extensive vocabulary of synonyms per label such as 'risk, dangerous, crisis' in anticipation of this feature being developed at some time.

Currently I have to search very many emails to find the one I need with the comments I made at the time. Huge time involved - for every search.

All that's needed is purely a multi-label search across all folders. No complex and/or of labels and folders.

Being in app dev I know this would be relatively simple to implement and fast to develop. It would also be a step towards later full search parameters as requested in this post.

Search needs improvement. It is just ok in the web app, but it is terrible in android app. Please fix it.

I'm OK with just the most basic feature: find the label within the folder. I use labels for categorization of different incoming groups; I want to be able to find what I haven't yet cleared from my inbox without having to sort through emails from other groups at the same time, particularly since scrolling up and down through folders to drag them to is inconvenient and time-consuming.
I'd be super happy if there was a syntax like "in:inbox has:work" for the search bar. This shouldn't require indexing and the ability to search inside the emails, right?

The lack of filtering (has this label but not that label) is why I did not sign up with Proton Mail.

Would also be great to be able to do a has:anylabel search. Essentially I want to be able to quickly see messages in my inbox that have a (any) label applied so i can archive them. Usually I've setup a rule to label important stuff and for inbox processing I mostly want to focus on things that haven't got a label - especially when I've fallen behind in my email management and want to quickly clear out my inbox.

I gave myself one month to test out Proton mail as a replacement of Gmail and I’m very surprised that this feature is not available. I need to search for emails that have X label but not Y. This is one of the critical features for me :/

I just moved over 250,000 emails from Gmail to Proton Mail, but tidying up my new-and-improved Labels and Folders will be way too daunting without these requested search abilities. I spent the time creating Labels and Folders for my needs, so please let me use it all for precise searching.

For example, I have 200 emails listed per page, and apparently a search result with more than ~20 pages (so ~4000 emails total?) eventually kicks me out of the page I'm on, saying there are too many search results. This is an explicit example of why I Need better search tools, to be able to work with smaller search results so that I don't get frozen out of my search results!

this seems like a basic feature that is missing

I'd be happy with even just a basic searchbar command for this. Being able to search on multiple tags/labels is incredibly useful for many use cases.

I am surprised that labels and folders are not searchable items on level with proper words. Any combination should be possible: Any number of labels in any number of folders.

This is a must one. We must be able to search in specific folder(s) for specific label(s). To limit the search to a folder OR to a label is really not enough for a modern email service. Please make sure to add this functionality and inform the community about release plan.