Gmail Advanced Searching - Use It!
It's quite possible that I'm just a little bit slow, but it wasn't until recently that I decided to really try to start using the powerful search functionality in Gmail. One of the best things about Gmail, to me, is the fact that you don't have to sort anything, ever. You can just archive it away and through the power of Google's search engine, just search for whatever you need. But often, I want to see a specific email from somebody, but I don't remember enough about the email to put more than the person's name in the email the search field.
On my desktop I use Nelson Email Organizer, which groups all of my emails by date, or person who sent it, or by the label that I've applied to it. It basically works as a database that sits on top of my Outlook email database, and organizes my emails in ways that make it really easy to find the exact emails that I'm looking for.
Gmail can do almost exactly the same thing, and has the added benefit of being web-based so I can look up emails anywhere (even on my Treo).
So anyway, to cut to the chase, to find all the emails from a particular person, like me for example, all you need to do is type "from:tony" in the search bar, and Gmail will list all emails from anyone named tony or who has "tony" as part of their email address. I can't tell you how much this has boosted my productivity - being able to locate emails quickly in this day and age, when emails are flyin' back and forth constantly and the volume is only growing, has become a necessity.
For a complete list of Gmail advance search operators: Gmail Advance Search Operators
2 comments:
call me lame, but one of the reasons i don't like gmail is not being able to sort by sender, but your tip makes it all better. i'm going to explore those search operators. kind of like re-learning how to use westlaw...
Not lame at all... I resisted using it for almost the exact same reason. But I've discovered that if you want to do something with gmail, you just have to poke around a little bit and you'll probably find a way to do it. In fact, I can't really think of anything that you can do with an client-side email program that you can't do with gmail (though you may have to install some add-ons).
Post a Comment