Gmail Email Searching Tips

Gmail with about 6 Gb of storage provides a very good search interface to search your emails. However, at times one finds it very difficult to search an email from your inbox. With a few tricks, you can use Gmail to find the exact message you're looking for, without all the scrolling.

If you got only a few emails in your inbox then search option seems to work great. But if you are like me and have tons of emails in your inbox, then these searching tips will help you.

The real power of Gmail search lies in search operators -- words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Andrea sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:andrea SFO.

Likewise you may try out these
  • A link from my co-worker Swapnil: from:swapnil http
  • Search for messages sent during a certain period of time
  • after:2004/04/16 before:2004/04/18
  • A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
  • That last chat I had with one of my college friend: Romi is:chat
  • All messages from ebay that aren't outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don't contain the word that follows it)
  • The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven't read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox
You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well.


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