Search with operators
Looking for a mail from your friend John? Use the Gmail search box and type from:john. Gmail will find all mails from John. If you can’t remember if the mail you are looking for was sent by John or Paul, type from:john OR paul.
If you have more than one friend called John, the search phrase looks like this: from:john-smith.
There are several operators of this kind:
- from:
- to:
- cc:
- bcc:
- subject:
- label:
- filename:
- has:attachment
- in:anywhere
- in:inbox
- in:trash
- in:spam
- is:starred
- is:unread
- is:read
- after:
- before:
The two last operators relate to dates. If you want to find emails from a April 2007, the form is: after:2007/03/31 before:2004/05/01.
If you want to search for a label consisting of more than one word, use hyphens, like in the example with John Smith above: label:holiday-france.
To find mail from email addresses within a certain domain, you just enter the domain in the “From:” field.
You can also use standard Boolean operators (AND, OR, +, -, quotes and parentheses). For an introduction to Boolean search, see the Pandia Goalgetter search tutorial.
Use the Google Toolbar
If you have the Google Toolbar installed (and many Page Rank junkies do), recent editions have a Gmail button you can use to search your mail.
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