Gmail has some excellent search features. Some of these search features are quite explicit and others are hidden. Some of these features don’t appear directly in the search results pane. There are filters, which can be used to guide incoming mails in to folders with labels, perform actions like delete and forward to other email addresses etc.

When you click on the down button in search query box in Gmail, you get some basic search options. These can be used to refine your searches.

Basic Searches

What you see here are some basic search options.

• From
• To
• Subject
• Has the words
• Doesn’t have
• Has attachment
• Date within — of —-
• is:chat
• is:anywhere

Now coming to some advanced searches. Gmail has some excellent advanced search options. These have become all the more important because today, Gmail is being extensively world over. Users have become so dependant on Gmail that they now don’t even move their data from their Gmail accounts and let them stay there for easier retrievability.

Advanced search features

• OR:- OR allows Gmail to search either of the terms which are separated by OR. For example subject: (lovely OR Rachel). Clicking enter would throw search results of both lovely and Rachel terms.
• ( ) :- Putting search terms in brackets would ensure that search results include only the terms which have been inserted inside the brackets. For Example subject: (blog edunetsys) would give results which have both the words blog and edunetsys in their subject line.
• - :- Hyphen or the minus sign is used to exclude some specific terms from the search results. subject: – edunetsys, would throw all results which do not have edunetsys in the subject.

More Advanced search features

In addition to the search features described above, there are some handy features which are relatively unknown.

• filename :-  file:edunetsys.pdf lets you search for those emails which have edunetsys.pdf as an attachment.
• List:- list:example@gmail.com would list out all the mails from a particular email id.
• cc:- cc:example@gmail.com would search and throw in search results all mails where the cc has been marked to example@gmail.com. Same logic can also be employed for bcc and deliveredto.
• Use of filters is well known and enough material can be found on www.

So when we rely so much on Gmail for our daily work, we must use these search features extensively to improve our productivity.

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Gmail Labs features worth trying.