Search Your Gmail Inbox Like a Pro
Search operators that you can use with Gmail
Google searching is definitely one of the most underrated skills and if you think that by just typing a bunch of words in the search box you are gonna get the most optimal results, then you need to re-consider.
In one of my articles a while back, I discussed about some useful tricks when it comes to Google searching that could eventually help you refine your search queries and get way better results by giving some hints to the algorithm.
But Google Search is not the only place you can use such hints in order to retrieve results more effectively. In the next few following sections, I’m going to demonstrate a few hacks that you can use in order to search your Gmail Inbox so that you get more targeted results and save some time!
1. Search for a recipient or sender
Searching from emails sent to a specific recipient or recipient is probably among the most commonly used queries. If you are looking for emails sent to a specific e-mail address, then you would have to use to:<email-address> expression, as shown below.
Likewise, if you are looking for emails you received from a specific sender then you will have to use the from:<email address> keyword;
2. Search for emails with attachments
Now let’s jump into the second type of search query you can take advantage of when scanning your inbox. Say you would like to see all the emails you received and they contained attached files in them. The has:attachment query will do the trick for you.
You can even search for attachments of a specific type , such as pdf or csv files using has:pdf and has:csv search terms respectively (or really any other file type you would like to search for).
Or even with a specific attachment file with the use of has:<filename> expression.
3. Search for emails received on a specific date
Now if you would like to search for messages sent during a certain time period you can use one of the following operators:
afterbeforeoldernewer
Note that you can even take advantage of the older_than: and newer_than: operators to search for messages older or newer than a time period using d (day), m (month) and y (year). For example, the following query will retrieve all the messages that are older than 3 days:
4. Searching for email subjects
Another possibility would be to search for specific words in the subject line of emails. To do so, you need to specify the subject: operator followed by the keyword (as much as you like) terms.
Note though that the above approach will result into emails that may have one, more or all keywords in the subject line. If you are looking for a specific phrase (i.e. search terms in a specific order), you will have to enclose them into quotes:
5. Searching for exact words or phrases in emails
Likewise, if you would like to search for exact words or phrases in emails (either subjects or body), then once again you will have to enclose the search terms in brackets:
6. Search for unread or starred emails
If you are that guy who leaves hundreds (or even thousands!) of e-mails unread, and you would like list such emails, then all you need to use is is: unread term.
Likewise, if you would like to list all emails that you have previously starred, you have to provide the is: starred search term.
7. Search for messages in specific folder
The in operator can be used to specify the folder (such as spam, important, social, snoozed etc) in a email search query:
Combine multiple expressions together
In programming, we tend to use logical operators a lot — the good news is we can actually use them also when searching our inbox in order to combine multiple filters together.
Let’s suppose we want to search for an email coming from a specific recipient that also has a file attached to it. We can combine those filters by using the AND logical operator:
You can even synthesize even more complex search queries by incorporating brackets to indicate higher presence between the logical operators. For instance, let’s suppose we would like to retrieve all emails with attached files, that have been sent to either of two different recipients. The search query provided in the screenshot below will do the trick for us.
Final Thoughts
Searching your Gmail inbox can sometimes be a tedious task but the good news is that Google has all the tools you need in order to make it easier for you. All you need to do is familiarise yourself with the search terms introduced earlier.
Feel free to bookmark this article and use it as a cheatsheet you can refer to every time you would like to search your inbox using a more sophisticated logic!
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