Searching your mail

To find a message, type one or more keywords into the Search mail box at the top of your mailbox, and hit Enter. By default, all folders except shared folders, Spam, and Trash will be searched. If you are currently in one of those folders, then just that folder will be searched instead.

Advanced Search

If you're having trouble finding what you're looking for, you can create a more specific search using our advanced search tool:

1. Click on the search bar at the top of the page.
2. Select the Advanced search… option from the menu that appears.

This lets you look for the keywords in specific places (for example the To: or Subject: fields), set the date range you want to search, specify whether the email must be unread or pinned, or have a particular type of attachment.

Saving searches

After performing a search, the search term appears in the sidebar on the left of the screen. Click the Save button next to the search to save it, so you can easily search the same thing another time. You can build detailed searches directly in the mail search box by combining options.

Searching particular folders

• in:<foldername>

By default, all folders will be searched except Spam and Trash. You can include these folders as well by ticking off the option that says include Spam and Trash in search.

If you'd like to search in specific folders, you can use the in keyword to narrow your search, such as in:Inbox OR in:Drafts. To specify a subfolder when using the in keyword, use a . to separate the subfolder's name from the parent folder, such as in:"Mailing Lists.Hiking".

Searching for a phrase

• from:<phrase>
• to:<phrase> (searches To, Cc and Bcc)
• subject:<phrase>
• body:<phrase>
• list:<phrase> (searches the List-Id header)
• header:<headername>:<phrase>

Phrases are matched using stemming: all different forms of the same word match to take into account plurals (fox, foxes) and tenses (fish, fishing, fished). This means, for example, that a search for "bus" will match "buses" but not "business".

If you want to disable stemming and search for an exact word or phrase, surround it in quotes (either ' or "). For example: "buses" or from:"Joe Bloggs" or subject:'string with "double" quotes', but not buses or from:Joe Bloggs or subject:"must end with same'. If you want to search for quotes or a backslash \, put a backslash before the character: use \", \' and \\.

You can also search for any word that matches a prefix by putting an asterisk (*) on the end, e.g. bus* would match "buses", "business", "bust" etc.

Searching by date

By default, searching looks for all messages, regardless of how old they are. If you'd like, you can narrow your search for a specific date or date range.

Searching by message size

• smaller|maxsize:<size>
• bigger|larger|minsize:<size>

A size is specified in bytes, with an optional suffix k, m, or g, e.g. larger:10m.

Combining searches

Operators to join search terms must be uppercase.

• AND — doesn't do anything, since this is the default.
• OR — e.g. from:rob OR from:richard.
• NOT — applies to the term it comes before. For example, since:"1 week ago" from:rob NOT subject:"new web interface" would find any messages from Rob in the last week that are not about the "new web interface".
• () — grouping, e.g. (from:rob subject:"new web interface") OR subject:urgent. This finds any mail from Rob with "new web interface" in the subject line, as well as mail from anyone with the subject "urgent".

You can also substitute the characters + and - for AND and NOT, respectively. In this case, -subject:"Flight" will return all mail where the subject does not contain the word "flight".

Searching by message state

• has|is:<boolean>
• filetype:image|document|spreadsheet|presentation|pdf
• flag:<flag name>

As an alternative to flag:<flag name>, you can search using keyword:<keyword>. This will search IMAP keywords.

The following states can be specified with the has or is keyword:

• read or seen
• unread or unseen
• pinned or flagged
• unpinned or unflagged
• replied or answered
• unreplied or unanswered
• attachment or hasatt
• noattachment or hasnoatt or noatt
• draft
• undraft

For backwards compatibility, we also support writing a term in UPPERCASE without the has or in keyword prefix. For example, the searches UNSEEN HASATT or is:unread has:attachment are the same, and will both show all unread messages with attachments.

The filetype keyword finds emails with attachments of the given type. It does this by looking at the MIME type of the attachments. Some systems may generate emails with attachments with the wrong or "missing" MIME types, in which case the search may fail to find the expected emails.

Searching for contact mail

If you want to search for mail from contacts, or even members of a particular contact group, you can use the fromin: operator. For messages sent to contacts, you can use the toin: operator.

• fromin: contacts
• toin: contacts
• fromin: "Group name"
• toin: "Group name"

Searching for a specific ID

• msgid:<id>

If you know the message id you are searching for, you can use the msgid operator to find it directly.

Making a rule from search

Want to move all messages from a search to a folder, mark them as read, or pin them? You can - by making a rule from search.

To take make a rule for emails meeting a search term, click on the Create rule button to the right of the search box. This will pull up our rules creation menu, so you can quickly build a rule based on your search query.

For more information on rules, take a look at Organizing your inbox with rules.