Why search operators are better than advanced search
Are you struggling to find that very important email? Do you waste a lot of time trying to search for a message that you know is somewhere within your inbox?
Well, in today's video, I wanna show you how to use Gmail search operators so you can become an expert at finding any message that you want. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And you're probably already familiar with the search bar here at the top of Gmail where you can type in simple words and we can just hit enter, for example, and find any message that has this word in it. And of course, we can use email addresses as well.
Now, you may also be familiar with the advanced search functionality here which gives you a lot more options. However, this advanced search can still be limiting depending on what you are after.
So, I wanna show you some basic search operators including some more advanced ones so you can find exactly what you're looking for. So let's go up here to our search bar, and I'm gonna search for this email address, Scottfriesen@hotmail.com.
Now, here what my results are showing are every single message where this person or this email address is included. So whether they sent it, whether I sent a message to them, all of that information is showing up here.
And that's why we see a whole section here that's labeled me.
Search From a specific email address
Because these are emails that I have sent to this email address. But that's maybe not what I'm after, I wanna see what is something that he has sent me.
I wanna see just the messages that are from this address. So all I need to do is go to the front of that email address and type in from: and then put colon and hit enter.
And now you can see that my results are quite a bit different here. Now, I don't see any of these mes, I may have replied to this message here but I am only seeing messages that have been sent from this individual.
Now, you're probably already saying, well, Scott, can't I do that here within the advanced search? I could just use this frontline.
Yes, you can, however, if you want to get more advanced and a little more granular, you're gonna want to use these search operators. On top of that, it can be a little tedious to use this menu here if you have to go and search for the different categories and okay, where do I go next in terms of what I want to search?
Once you get adept and more comfortable at using these search operators, you may never wanna go back to the advanced search dropdown. So, in this case, let's say that I want to find the messages
Search After or Before a specific date
that have been sent from this address, but only this year in 2021. Here you can see in these search results, I'm getting everything back.
I've got all of the messages that have been sent from this address. So, another operator we can use is after, and we just continue on, a space after the email address, I'm gonna say after: and then colon.
And now all I need to do is select what date. Well, if I want it to be this year, I'm just gonna type in January 1st, 2021 and I'm going to hit enter.
And here you can see my results are now updated. I'm only seeing messages in which this person has sent me after this particular date.
And the great thing about search operators is that you can continue on and on to get more and more granular. So let's take a look at some other ones that may be helpful for us.
We've already looked at after a particular date, but we can also change this to before. Those are two very common ones.
So, let's say before 2021, I'm gonna hit enter. Well, I'm obviously gonna see the results that were obscured or that were hidden from us just previously.
So you can choose these very specific date ranges if you know for certain, oh, I'm certain that he sent me this message sometime last year, for example. So after and before can be very, very helpful.
Using OR as a search operator
But let's clear this out for a second and let's take a look at another search operator, which can be very, very helpful. So once again, I'm gonna type in this email address, a test email, by the way, Scottfriesen@hotmail.com.
But I also want to see messages that include someone else. And that's where we wanna use the operator OR.
So if we use the operator capital O capital R, we can now add other operators into the mix. So in this case, I wanna see all the messages that include this email address but also this other one, this Gmail address.
So, I'm gonna hit enter now and we're gonna see quite a few results here. You can see in the top right-hand corner it says we're viewing one to 50 of many.
If I go over, we can see that there's actually a total of 53 messages that either contain this email address or this email address.
Using AND as a search operator
But what if I want to see any messages that include both of them on the same message? Well, in this case, what we'd want to do is change our OR to AND.
So if I hit AND and hit enter here, so now our search results have been limited to just one message, why? Because this happens to be the only message in my account where both of these email addresses are included.
If we open up this message, and we may have to expand this here, you can see it was sent by this Gmail account. But if we come down here and hover, we can see that this message below was sent by this Hotmail account.
So yes, they are both included, they are both involved in this particular message. Again, just very quickly I'm gonna change this back to OR just so you understand the differences here.
Now, every other message that we're seeing except for the one that we just saw, which is also going to be included here are from either of these two but there only happens to be one where both of them are involved at the exact same time.
Search for a particular Label
So here's another drawback of using the advanced search is that one of the options that it doesn't give us is how to search with a particular label or search for a particular label. Now, it's true we could use our labels here on the left-hand side, I could just click on URGENT and I can see all of my messages.
And what you will notice is if you come up here to the search bar when you click on any of these particular labels, it is actually including these search operator up at the top in the search bar.
So let's say we wanna go beyond just what's urgent, we wanna see what is urgent and maybe that is created or that has been left behind in the past. So here we're gonna continue on and I'm gonna type in before and I'm gonna just put a year before 2021.
I'm gonna hit enter and now we can see I've got a lot of messages that are actually quite old but they are still labeled urgent. Again, I can continue to add on and add on and add on to the search bar to be more granular in terms of what I want to find.
Let's say I want to see, well, is any of these from this Hotmail address that we were looking at before? And yes, actually most of them are, it looks like in this particular case.
How about the other individual that we were looking at, this other test account from Gmail? No, so I don't have to worry if I thought that message was in this label or in this area or before 2021.
Now, you can start to see the layering effect of using these search operators. A few other things that you can do beyond the advanced search, here we do have a Has attachment checkbox.
Search for a specific Filename
So to see if something has a particular checkbox, but what if we know what that attachment actually is? So in this case, we can use an operator called filename: and I'm gonna type in PDF in this case.
And you can see I don't have many messages with a PDF, I only happen to have this one at the moment. What if I know it has a particular JPEG image in it?
I'm gonna type in that file name and now I've got these three results here waiting for me. So if you know the file name, the file type, or the file extension, this can be another great way to zero in on what you are looking for.
Now, another complaint that many people have
Search Anywhere including Spam and Trash
when they use the search bar up here is that the results are typically limited to just messages that are either in their all mail account, meaning either in their inbox or one of the labels that are listed here.
Now it often includes things that have been sent as well. But what if you want to make sure that this keyword or this particular message is anywhere, including in spam or in your trash bin?
Well, in this case, what we want to do is we want to use the operator in.
So let's go back to our example of searching for messages from this Hotmail account.
And if I hit enter and I'm just gonna hit one more over, you can see I have a total of 51 results or 51 messages that are bringing back. However, if I continue on and say in
and hit enter, let's go over and see what my total is.
My total is now 56, so why has it changed? Well, if I come back over here and scroll down, you can actually see that we now have a few messages that have this trash can beside it, meaning that these messages are actually currently located in the trash.
Remember, your standard search is only going to limit it to things that are not in trash or not in your spam folder. But if you add in, it will bring back absolutely everything.
So if you wanna make sure that something isn't getting lost or if you haven't missed something in the trash, in can be an absolute time-saver.
Search for CC or BCC
The last one I wanna share with you today is CC or BCC. So for example, maybe I just wanna see the things that I or someone else have been copied on, maybe they were not sent the email or they were not appearing in the to field.
So in this case, I'm gonna stick with this sample email here and in this case, I gonna say, actually we need to put this at the beginning, my apologies. We need to put it at the beginning.
Now, you're gonna see all the messages where this person has been CC'd. And this is something I created just a moment ago just so you can see this, that this Hotmail account he was CC'd on this message that's why we're only getting one result here.
Now, if you'd like to see the full list of search operators that you can use with Gmail, I'll include a link to this page so that you can experiment and find the search terms and even the filtering options that you need to find the messages that you want.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. If you wanna learn more about using filters and labels here within Gmail, I recommend that you click on this video right here.
And if you have further questions about using Gmail and search operators, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.
