Gmail’s slogan goes “Search, don’t sort”. This is an obvious choice for a company best known for their search engine. And with virtually unlimited storing space for each Gmail account, chances are you will need some powerful search strategies. Here are a whole list of them.

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.

In spite of some concerns about privacy, most recently in relation to Search History, I still haven’t uninstalled Google Toolbar in my browser.

Still can’t find it?

Is there a message you know is there, somewhere, and it still doesn’t show up in the search results?

Gmail doesn’t search for message in Spam or Trash unless you explicitly instructs it to. You do this by clicking the Search Options link to the right of the search box and choosing Mail & Spam & Trash from the Search drop-down menu.

And remember that Gmail doesn’t return partial matches. This means that if you search for “chocolate” it won’t show results containing “chocolates”.

Gmail search results don’t include most special characters either, such as square brackets [], parentheses (), currency symbols $, ampersands &, pound signs #, and asterisks *.