Ever find yourself looking for an e-mail for a second too long on Gmail? Well then read ahead if you want to learn about Gmail’s advanced search operators to find what you are looking for quickly and accurately.

You can use these advanced search operators if you simply click on the Show Search Option link near the search bar but I’ll show you how to use them faster.

Examples of Advanced Search Operators in Gmail

So for example, let’s say you know specifically what you are looking for. You want to find an e-mail from John that contains an attachment. Typically we’d simply search for John but that would give us all e-mails that refer to John anywhere in the e-mail. Using the advanced search operators we can form a query to to find exactly what we are looking for. For example instead of searching for John, we’d search for the following using multiple advance search operators:

from:John has:attachment

The following query would look for e-mails from John that contain an attachment. A lot better huh?

There are a lot more advanced search operators that are extremely useful to use as well. For example, let’s say we were looking for an e-mail that has been read, was sent to Bob and was found in our label Work. The following would be the query:

is:read to:Bob label:Work

Doesn’t that narrow down your search results by quite a bit?

A list of more advanced search operators

Below I’ll construct a brief list of operators with a simple example and brief explanation.

The following advanced search operators are pretty intuitive:

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from:Alice
to:Alice
subect:homework
label:School
has:Attachment
filename:homework.pdf
cc:Bob
bcc:Foo

With the following advanced search operators we can narrow down where to look for the e-mails.

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in:anywhere (* Messages in Spam and Trash are excluded from search by default )
in:inbox
in:trash
in:spam

With the following we can narrow it down to messages with the following properties.

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is:starred
is:unstarred
is:read
is:unread
is:important

We can even specify when we received these e-mails.

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after:1/01/1101
before:1/10/0110

Now there are a couple more operators to help us query our information even more specific.

The following find’s e-mails from Bob or Alice.

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from:Bob OR from:Alice

Find e-mails containing the phrase and containing the set of words in the subject line, respectively.

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subject:"Homework Assignment 1" 
subject:(internship opportunity)

I tried covering all the operators that would be the most useful. If you want me to explain one in more detail or one that I missed please let me know. The list can be found on Gmail’s Advanced Search Operators help page.

Summary

Learning how to use these search operators will make you own your inbox like a king. Never again will you be searching through a list of e-mails once learn how to query for them specifically. So tell me, is there another way you use Gmail that we should know about? Let us know in the comments.