Using Gmail: Search

This post is part of the series Using Gmail. Check out all the posts from this series here.

I used to be an avid filer of email messages. I had a well-developed system of folders in Outlook that every message that I wanted to keep would go into. It worked, to an extent, but one of the limitations of the system was that I had to remember which folder a particular message was in if I was going to find it.

Today, I don’t file any of my messages into folders. Once I’ve read & acted on my messages I simply archive them. What this basically does is simply removes the message from my inbox and puts it into a big pot with other messages. This might sound like chaos, but the system works extremely well because of the power of Google’s search abilities in Gmail.

There are a number of ways you can search for a message in Gmail. You can click on “Show search options” next to the search box in Gmail (pictured above) to be guided to your results. But I find it helpful to have a few search options memorized to more quickly find the message I’m looking for. Here are a few of the types of searches that I find useful:

• Person’s name or email address. You can type in part or all of someone’s name and Google will find any messages that match that. Example: “Rock” will find messages from Rocky, to Rocky, mention Rocky’s name, or any other form of the word rock (rocks, rockies, etc.). A bonus of this type of search is Gmail by default adds any address you send a message to into your contacts, so you could actually find a message sent from/to a particular address.
• Messages from you to a certain person. I use this one ALL the time. You can do a search like this:
  
  This will find every message you’ve ever sent to Rocky (obviously substitute the person’s name for who you’re searching for).
• Messages from another person. I use this one on the rare occasion that someone asks me if I ever got an email they sent and I didn’t read or respond to it. You can quickly find out if you let something slip by.
  
• Messages that have an attachment. This one is great for both finding files and also clearing out lager messages if you’ve somehow managed to eat up most of Google’s allotted storage space. It’s most useful when you tack it on with another search (like trying to find the message from a few months ago when a leader sent you a PDF file).
  
• Messages in a particular date range. If you’re pretty sure you know there’s a message you need to find from a certain range of dates, you can search for that, too. I find this helpful when you’re looking for messages about an event that happened.
  

Check you the video below from Google for a demonstration. You can also check out the full list of search options available here.

How do you manage your email messages? Any search tips you’ve found to be useful?