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Once you know the relevant syntax for your search needs, you can start locating your past emails in seconds, rather than hours.Īs good as Gmail is – and don’t get us wrong, we love Gmail – there are some things that it just doesn’t do right out of the box. Overall, Gmail excels at its search functionality.
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(Note that, in this example, the search is started at the end of October and ended at the start of January to capture the full date range). So, for example, you want to locate an email between November and December 2019 that was about invoicing, type: Once you’ve gotten used to using date-based search syntax, you can start including keywords to further narrow down your search. Narrowing down your date search with keywords So, if you want to find an email received after Feb 1st, 2017, but that’s older than 5 months old, type. To locate an email received within the last 2 years, type:Ĭombining “before” and “after” with “newer_than” and “older_than”Īnd finally, you can get even more granular by searching for emails that were sent after a specific date, but that are older than a certain number of days, months, or years. To find an email received longer than 6 months ago, type:
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Locating an email that’s older or newer than a certain time period So, if you want to locate an email sent between January 1st, 2020 and January 3rd, 2020, type: Gmail also lets you locate emails that were received during a particular period by combining After and Before conditions in the advanced search function. To locate emails received after a certain date, type into the search bar After:YYYY/MM/DD and press Enter.įor instance, if you want to search for emails that were received after January 1st, 2020, type:ĪDD_THIS_TEXT Locating an email between two dates So, for example, if you want to search for emails received before January 17th, 2015, then type: To locate emails received before a certain date, type into the search bar Before:YYYY/MM/DD and press Enter. Locating an email before or after a certain date
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