Have you made the most out of GMail Features?

It’s been four years since I am using GMail, and still I love it as a brand new toy. No doubt, the service from Google means GMail scores amazingly on search. Even they say “Search, don’t sort” but searching and filter based sorting is what makes it competition killer. Even power users are not fully aware of all the search operators. Here are some tips I use to get most out of my emailing.
Searching with Boolean in Google Mail
OR : capitalization matters, ‘OR’ term is used to specify to search for either of terms separated by the ‘OR’ word. Like for example I submit search as ‘Coffee OR Tea’ then I would get all the mails which contains word Coffee or Tea (Or both). We can use | as a replacement or even placed ‘OR’ terms in curly brackets ‘{}’ and the result would be same (though not documented) that means ‘Tea OR Coffee’, Tea | Coffee’ and ‘{Tea Coffee}’ will produce the same effect
AND: is the default behavior for GMail, so wouldn’t necessary to put it search (but sometimes necessary to construct complex searches) again just putting SPACE yields the same result. For example, Putting “Mango AND Apple” (or “Mango Apple” or “Mango+Apple”) will search for mails, containing both Mango and Apple
NOT: Ever need to exclude certain terms from results? Then ‘NOT’ is useful. It searches only mails in which given term is ‘NOT’ present. Example ‘NOT’ chat would search all the mails which does Not contain the word chat. We can use – (hyphen) for this or even ! (exclamation symbol, but again not documented)
e.g. ‘NOT party’, ‘-Party’ and ‘!Party’ will give us same results.
So we can combine these Boolean operators and play search, like (Mango AND Orange NOT Banana) OR Apple will give us results in which either word Apple is found OR both Mango and Orange is found BUT not Banana
For further searching GMail also provided with lots of keywords, and
syntax for using them is <keyword>:<search> (Remember: No space in between)
These keywords are
FROM: is used to search sender. Like if I put ‘from:abc@xyz.com’ then gmail will search all the mails which are form abc@xyz.com
TO: is used to search based on recipient of the mail. Example searching ‘TO:dumbo@gmail.com’ will give the mails which are sent to Dumbo J. Like wise GMail also have ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ keywords for searching CC and BCC fields respectively. Use them in the same way for CC and BCC – ‘CC:xyz@xyz.com’ & ‘BCC:xyz@xyz.com’
SUBJECT: will only search given terms in subject field in mail. Like searching ‘Subject:Quotation’ will search all mails in which subject contains the word quotation.
IN: for restraining our search into specific folders, IN operator is used, like ‘IN:sent’ will search only sent mails, likewise ‘IN:inbox’, ‘IN:anywhere’ (when you want to search all the mails, including trash and spam which is excluded by default.
IS: is word is used along with certain keywords to search mails, like ‘IS:READ’, ‘IS:STARRED’, ‘IS:SPAM’ etc
LABEL: as you must have created many labels for filtering mails, you can use this operator for searching only specific labels, like ‘LABEL:forwards’ will search only mails which have forwards as label
‘HAS:ATTACHMENT’ is simple keyword to see if mail has attachment
FILENAME: will search for mail with specified filename or extension as a attachment, like querying for ‘filename:ZIP’ will give all mails which contains zip-file in attachment
AFTER and BEFORE: are only available for time line search, we can construct mails which are sent/received during specified time duration. Example searching for ‘AFTER:2008/06/30 BEFORE:2008/07/07? will give all mails which are sent received on first week of this July BDV-52486-BDV

gmail

It’s been four years since I am using GMail, and still I love it as a brand new toy. No doubt, the service from Google means GMail scores amazingly on search. Even they say “Search, don’t sort” but searching and filter based sorting is what makes it competition killer. Even power users are not fully aware of all the search operators. Here are some tips I use to get most out of my emailing.

Searching with Boolean in Google Mail

OR : capitalization matters, ‘OR’ term is used to specify to search for either of terms separated by the ‘OR’ word. Like for example I submit search as ‘Coffee OR Tea’ then I would get all the mails which contains word Coffee or Tea (Or both). We can use | as a replacement or even placed ‘OR’ terms in curly brackets ‘{}’ and the result would be same (though not documented) that means ‘Tea OR Coffee’, Tea | Coffee’ and ‘{Tea Coffee}’ will produce the same effect

AND: is the default behavior for GMail, so wouldn’t necessary to put it search (but sometimes necessary to construct complex searches) again just putting SPACE yields the same result. For example, Putting “Mango AND Apple” (or “Mango Apple” or “Mango+Apple”) will search for mails, containing both Mango and Apple

NOT: Ever need to exclude certain terms from results? Then ‘NOT’ is useful. It searches only mails in which given term is ‘NOT’ present. Example ‘NOT’ chat would search all the mails which does Not contain the word chat. We can use – (hyphen) for this or even ! (exclamation symbol, but again not documented)

e.g. ‘NOT party’, ‘-Party’ and ‘!Party’ will give us same results.

So we can combine these Boolean operators and play search, like (Mango AND Orange NOT Banana) OR Apple will give us results in which either word Apple is found OR both Mango and Orange is found BUT not Banana

For further searching GMail also provided with lots of keywords, and

syntax for using them is <keyword>:<search> (Remember: No space in between)

These keywords are:

FROM: is used to search sender. Like if I put ‘from:abc@xyz.com’ then gmail will search all the mails which are form abc@xyz.com

TO: is used to search based on recipient of the mail. Example searching ‘TO:dumbo@gmail.com’ will give the mails which are sent to Dumbo J. Like wise GMail also have ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ keywords for searching CC and BCC fields respectively. Use them in the same way for CC and BCC – ‘CC:xyz@xyz.com’ & ‘BCC:xyz@xyz.com’

SUBJECT: will only search given terms in subject field in mail. Like searching ‘Subject:Quotation’ will search all mails in which subject contains the word quotation.

IN: for restraining our search into specific folders, IN operator is used, like ‘IN:sent’ will search only sent mails, likewise ‘IN:inbox’, ‘IN:anywhere’ (when you want to search all the mails, including trash and spam which is excluded by default.

IS: is word is used along with certain keywords to search mails, like ‘IS:READ’, ‘IS:STARRED’, ‘IS:SPAM’ etc

LABEL: as you must have created many labels for filtering mails, you can use this operator for searching only specific labels, like ‘LABEL:forwards’ will search only mails which have forwards as label

‘HAS:ATTACHMENT’ is simple keyword to see if mail has attachment

FILENAME: will search for mail with specified filename or extension as a attachment, like querying for ‘filename:ZIP’ will give all mails which contains zip-file in attachment

AFTER and BEFORE: are only available for time line search, we can construct mails which are sent/received during specified time duration. Example searching for ‘AFTER:2008/06/30 BEFORE:2008/07/07? will give all mails which are sent received on first week of this July BDV-52486-BDV