GMail’s best search tricks and how to get the most out of this powerful feature.

OR No search system is complete without at least a few boolean operators, and GMail is no exception. While AND is implied in most searches, sometimes you need OR to get the results you want. In this example, I’m trying to get messages about Christmas plans from both sisters.

Label : Labels are already a very useful GMail feature, and the search function only makes it better. You can tell the search to return only messages with a particular label attached. If I have a Work label for all my work-related emails and I want to find a message relating to last year’s company picnic, I can use label: to avoid getting messages relating to my countless other picnics of 2008

IS Another very handy one, is: lets you see only messages in a certain state, like read, unread, or starred. Here, I’m trying to get any emails from Damien which I had previously marked as important (starred).

Parentheses I just recently learned about this, and I’m very glad I did. Using parentheses you can group items for use with things like OR. Parentheses can shorten what might otherwise be a long search string. Let’s say I’m searching for the XBox Live names of my friends Adam, Galt and Joe. I could write out three separate from: statements much like #6, or I could use parentheses to group items together.

Carboncopy (CC) Much like To: and From:, you can filter to show messages with a certain person in the cc or bcc fields. Here I am searching for all party-related messages that involve my good friend The Dude

Combinations : A few of these examples have combined the search options into single queries. GMail gives nearly unlimited flexibility when combining complex search options. You can get extremely detailed results by combining the options to return exactly what you want. The following is an attempt to bring up all messages from both of my sisters about all our prior Christmas plans, that also have pictures attached, but not including our trip to Kentucky.

Removing keywords A common websearch function applied to email. You can filter out items containing certain words. For example, if I want to get a list of all my MakeTechEasier messages, but not those relating to pingbacks, I can remove items containing that word from my results with the minus sign.

To: and From: Probably the simplest and most often used search function is the ability to specify sender or recipient. By specifying a name or email address you can narrow results to items written by (or to) a name or email address. In this example, I’m trying to get all the emails I’ve written about MakeTechEasier to Damien.

Attachment:This one’s pretty self-explanatory – you can get only the results that have a file attached. In this example Im looking for all emails from my sister that may have pictures of her kids.

Filename: Similar to #9 above, but this time you can specify an exact filename, or even just part of a filename in an attachment.

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