The INBOX size is now exploding. GMail now offers almost 6.5 GB of Inbox space and well, 20 MB attachments. How cool is that!! But, I have been using GMail since, umm…end of 2004, and by now , I have almost 38% occupied. That is almost 2.6 GB. Pheww! A total of 3700 mails with no archives. I don’t know how much would the number touch once I start counting the archives as well. So, the basic problem faced by me is getting back to a mail sent to me by a friend, say ‘Mohit’ on a summer of 2005 and which had some attachment. I really don’t remember what he had on the Subject line and well, really have a faint idea that it was something good that he sent in the attachment. Perhaps a funny presentation or whatever. But how do I go about searching for it from the 3700 mails that I have. (For some that’s a very small number. I have friends who are almost touching the upperlimit with 10k mails and counting. Yes, they live on GMail). SO here’s how you search your Mails the easy way. GMail’s blog released some hack today , and I am sharing some from the treasure.

Yes, you guessed it right, Search Operators it is.

So if I’m searching a mail sent by Mohit, I would put in the search bar: from:Mohit. And if I know when he sent it, say in 2005. I could narrow down the search results by adding  in 2005. So the search query would be - from:Mohit in 2005. However if you put “in 05″, you will get results of mails sent in 2005, as well as May of any year, or the 5th of any month of any year.

For searching for mails having attachments, the search query to add is ‘has:attachments’. And like any Google search engine query, it can be appended. e.g. from:Mohit in 2005 has:attachments.

If you had labeled a mail sent by a friend, you can search by searching for,”from:mohit label:flickr” etc. The same works for Subject as well. And if you really are into finding SPECIFIC stuff, you can add conditions like from and to dates, and/or conditions etc.And yes, the Show Search options on the right of the search bar is for those who find using operators a bit on the wild side.

Happy GMailing. Adios!

Image Courtesy:angie_real Angela Lobefaro