The Search

When you're looking for an email, you can use the search bar across the top of the page. You have probably done this before, typing in a sender's name or even a few keywords. To narrow down your search, you have some advanced options you might not have noticed. To find these, click on the little drop down arrow that shows in the corner of the search bar.

At the top, you can select a specific location for your search (all mail, starred, inbox, etc.). You can search for a specific sender or recipient. You can search for specific words in the subject or body of the email, as well as excluding specific words from the search. Another handy options is to select the box for "Has attachment" which will only return emails that have an attachment. You can also check the box to exclude chats from your search. Another helpful option is the ability to specify size and/or a date range. As always with searching, remember to put quotes around any phrases to search for the exact phrase instead of searching for each word separately.

Search operators are my go to! If an email exists - I can find it using these operators. I generally don't even bother with the drop down options talked about above. If you can learn even a few of these operators, you will become a Gmail searching ninja.

Search operators are things you can type directly into the search bar to help narrow down your search. I've put a table below with some of my favorite ones.

If you want to get a bit more technical, you can click here to see some other advanced search operators on Gmail's support page.

Example:

If I wanted to search for an email from Jill about geometry that has a Google Slides link attachment and was sent before December 1, 2016, it would look like this:

If I knew for certain the word geometry was in the subject of the email, I would have used subject:geometry to narrow the search even more. You can see that narrowing down your search can be very easy once you learn these search operators.