If Your Gmail account contains thousands of email messages you can use these awesome tips to have a better search for Gmail to sort and find information trapped in your Gmail email messages quickly and efficiently.
1. Search emails using advanced Gmail search operators
You can use a number of special Operators like Boolean operators (OR, NOT etc.) to perform specialized searches in Gmail. For example:
If you write subject:Budget OR subject:Proposal in the search box you can search mails with either Budget or Proposal in their Subject lines. You can get the complete list of advanced Gmail search operators with easy explanations here.
2. Use Gmail Labels for quick search
Use Labels to keep your emails organized as well as easily searchable. For example you can Label all mails from family as “Family” and later if you need a mail sent by a family member it is much easier to find it by that Label “Family”.
3. Create Gmail Filters to organize data automatically
Filters help you create rules to sort emails and organize them according to the filter rules. For e.g. you can create a Gmail Filter to move all mails containing the word “Newsletter” to a separate Label. Later you can search any Newsletter related mail under that Label only. More help in creating advanced Filters can be found in this Mashable Article.
4. Search using Date feature
Click on the little drop arrow (on the Right) in the simple search bar in Gmail. Here you can search emails using Date feature in addition to other search options.
If you remember even vaguely the time of the mail, you need just enter an approximate date and set Gmail Search to search around that date.
5. Search Gmail for Attachments
You can search Gmail for attachments using the following expressions:
Has:Attachment (This only shows mails with attachments.)
Has:attachment *.jpg (Searches for all JPG attachments.)
You can also use a free service like Attachments.me to help you search your attachments better. Sign in using your Google account to let Attachments.me crawl and index your attachments to help you search them better.
6. Search within Gmail priority inbox only
You can search only Priority inbox to search in only your important mails leaving out Junk and spam mails using the following expressions:
is:important (For E.g. is:important from:Martin)
label:important (For E.g. label:important from:Family)
7. Use a Cloud Search Service like CloudMagic
CloudMagic is a free professional Gmail and Twitter search service. Sign up using an Email account and link your Google account to CloudMagic. Once linked you can search your Gmail messages from within CloudMagic service. It is also available as app fro android, iPhone, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.
8. Search Gmail email messages using “Regular Expression” in Google Docs
Yes!! You can indeed use Google Docs to search your Gmail Messages. Read this excellent Tutorial by noted blogger Amit Agarwal to learn how to use Google docs to search your Gmail messages using the power of regular expressions.
9. Search within Gmail attachments using Google docs
Gmail automatically searches your text attachments for the search term. However it doesn’t search within attached documents like word and excel documents. But there is a workaround. Just enable “Apps Search” Labs feature in settings.
This will allow search for any term inside attached documents like Word and PDF as well.
10. Download Gmail to Outlook and search emails in Outlook
Gmail gives you Pop3 and IMAP access in settings. Using this feature, you can configure Microsoft Outlook on your desktop to connect to Gmail using either POP3/IMAP. Once your messages are downloaded to Microsoft Outlook you can search emails using the powerful search features available in Outlook search.
If you have any other Gmail Tip for our users we will love to hear that in comments below.
This post was originally published on Indigic.com
