10-19-2005

Advanced Email Searches in Google Desktop

Google Desktop Search has made finding information on my computers much easier. I now put a lot less thought than I used to into where I store files. Recent versions even feature searching of Thunderbird email messages, which is much faster than the search features built into Thunderbird itself.

Somewhere recently I found out about the advanced operators, specifically for searching email. I’m already finding them to be very handy:

Advanced email search
You can restrict your search to look for matches within email message headers. The available email search operators are:

  • Subject:
  • To:
  • From:
  • Cc:
  • Bcc:

Sample usage:

  • subject:spirit returns all emails with the word “spirit” in the Subject: field.
  • subject:”Will Eisner” returns all emails with the exact phrase “Will Eisner” in the Subject: field.
  • subject:(spirit eisner) returns all emails with both words “spirit” and “eisner” in the Subject: field. Both words must be present in the Subject: field, but they can be in any order and do not have to be next to each other.
  • subject:spirit eisner returns all emails with the word “spirit” in the Subject: field and the word “eisner” anywhere in the email, including the body.

You can combine multiple email header restrictions in one query. For example, a search on [subject:spirit from:denny] will return only those email messages that have both “spirit” in their Subject: field and “denny” in their From: field. As with the other operators, you cannot have a space between any email header operator and its related search term.

Posted by Matt in communication, tech | RSS 2.0

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