Mastering the Search Option in G Suite

At the time when Gmail was introduced on April 1, 2004, it made a shift in how we perceived emails. Then the norm was Hotmail's 2MB free storage, or using an ISP email address. Those days of having to tightly manage your email storage are history now.

Instead of deleting the messages, the idea of archiving them indefinitely became possible. Gmail empowers you with a clean interface to keep a tidy inbox and powerful search capabilities, so you can find and retrieve old emails whenever needed.

Gmail search is also speedy which makes it user-friendly and practical as well, even if you

don't keep your inbox at all organized.

First Things First

If you don't wish to remember any operators, clicking on the search box down arrow will bring up a dialog with fields that help us in searching mails, covering different queries using labels, date, recipient, subject, size and so on.

Those who love keyboard shortcuts will like to enter operators by themselves. So make

sure that you have Gmail keyboard shortcuts turned on (Shift + ' / ' shows the full list)

and hitting ' / ' (forward slash) will bring focus on the search box.

size: and larger:

If you're running out of space (G Suite Basic offers ~30GB of storage), looking up old

emails that are larger than say, 5mb larger:05m will help you find those emails with huge

attachments you don’t need anymore, saving precious free inbox space in the

process and helping you manage space.

From: To: Subject:

It runs a standard search while adding who you sent or received an email from. This will narrow the search results considerably, effectively filtering results in a single go. Gmail will help matters further by autocompleting names if there is someone in your address book.

Similarly, with subject: the emails' content and search text in the subject line can be ignored

only.

has:attachment and filename:

You can add "has:attachment" if you're looking for a specific email about your "home" project that had an attachment added to it, and you'll only get results with emails that have your particular query term and attachments.

Or if you wish to get a particular file you can search by filename. The

'filename:operator is also used to look up file types/extensions, so you can use "Infiflex

Technologies Managed Services to power up your business  G Suite  (1):pdf" and

it will reduce the search.

More Options :

is: starred/unread/read/chat

If you utilize Gmail's star framework to mark vital messages, this will help to narrow things down extensively. Or then again in the event that you use Google Chat, searching just inside visits, can be a lifeline, For instance: "is:chat Debjani".

before: and after:

In spite of the fact that a touch unwieldy to utilize as opposed to picking a date from the pursuit drop-down menu. For very specific queries you can utilize the yyyy/mm/dd position, to look inside a specific time period.

has:attachment larger:5M after:2018/10/10 before:2019/10/11

In:anywhere

Gmail search ignores Trash and Spam folders by default, so this operator overrides it and searches everywhere. Using brackets () and OR Brackets () lets you group terms.

For instance, "subject:(G Suite - Infiflex )" will search for the total term in the headline just, while attempting to do likewise without sections "subject:G Suite - Infiflex", would search for the word 'G Suite' in the subject and '- Infiflex' wherever else. The OR operator (must be capitalized) works somewhat like programming. So you can coordinate different terms. For instance, a scan for two distinct senders: "from:Nisha OR from:Ankita" There are a couple of more search operators that we haven't covered here deliberately, since the above will cover 98% of your needs.