Gmail Tips: Power Searching and Filtering
by Lynette
While spring cleaning my Gmail today, I wanted to delete a bunch of unread emails that spanned many, many pages. Not wanting to spend time sitting there paging through like 20 pages and deleting from each one, I figured there must be a better way.
How do you pull up only the unread emails? Gmail doesn’t have a one-click button to do that. Then it occurred to me. Why search of course but, what do I search for? Thankfully there is a list of advanced search commands you can use. In case you’re wondering, you’d type is:unread in the search box and hit search. Easy.
There are also many advanced searches you can do in lieu of sorting. For example if you wanted to search for emails containing the word “movie” within all the emails labeled “sister”, you’d type label:sister movie. More super helpful search operators can be found here.
Related Entries
June 5th, 2007 at 10:14 am
The key is to check your eamil at least once a day even for only 2 minutes.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:41 am
Thanks for the tip.
@ OnBeingParents
I don’t think that would do it, since if you have a blog and you’ve subscribed to comments you’ll surely see whole lot of pages of mail just being comments. I don’t think 2 minute will be enough.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Hi Hans and OnBeingParents. Other than the volume of emails, it’s also a choice. As someone who works from home, and still try to be there for family life, I’ve got to be very disciplined with how I spend my time. It’s easy to get caught up checking email every hour/two hours and email checking can be so unproductive.