just an asterisk

Teeny note: This wasn’t supposed to be a multi-part article, but while brainstorming, it was clear that there was simply too much to cover in one post. Look for parts 2-4 in the coming weeks.

According to Wikipedia, “Gmail launched on 1 April 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and became available to the general public on 7 February 2007″ (source). I have used Gmail since 11/2005 (not to toot my own horn or anything) and I’ve consistently been amazed with all of the features (often unheralded) from Google. Google has their own page devoted to why you can use Gmail (here), and others have written good reviews (joke), but as always, I’m going to try to provide you with ways to use Gmail better!

Note: To spice up these articles, I’m going to refer to a few Google “labs” features, so you’ll need to activate these features individually in your Gmail account. You can access labs from your settings menu (top right) on the tab labs.

Search better…Boolean terms and saved searches

You’ve probably used Gmail’s search feature before. It is easy and quick, finding emails by keyword exactly in the same way as Google.com. Using the “more search options” feature makes searching even easier and allows you to specify exact criteria. However, what you may not know is that the standard search bar has hidden power. Actually, it’s not really hidden, Google is very open about it…. but unless your first thought when you search is “boolean operator”, perhaps a little more detail is needed?

For our purposes, the relevant Boolean operators are “AND”, “OR”. It turns out that George Boole wanted to define relationships between objects mathematically and created logic. His brilliant ideas have become part of search… To receive results with both “cats” and “dogs” type “cats AND dogs“. To receive either results about “cats” or “dogs”, type “cats OR dogs“. Not rocket science so far, but what if you combine the two? You could search for either references to “fish” or references to both “cats” and “dogs” by typing “fish OR (cats AND dogs)“. Get it?  Note: the capital letters are REQUIRED for these operators to work correctly (as far as I can tell).

Finally, you can remove terms that are messing up your results with “-“. For example, let’s say that I search for “bank” and “new york” because I need to find a specific email for my finances. My Chase bank balances (which I always seem to forget to delete) hog all of the results, something in the order of a few thousand. How can I see results without any reference to Chase? Add “-Chase” to my search terms and all Chase results will be ommited.

Other interesting operators to help you search:
Has:Attachment = only show me emails with attachments
label:mylabel = filter to show only mylabel emails
is:unread or is:read = read or unread
is:starred = only starred
from: and to: = specify the sender or recipient

This is only a sampling of the possible operators. For a full list go to this help page from Google.

You might be thinking that this is great, but more than a bit labor intensive. Agreed! Saved searches are the final piece of the puzzle. Google labs has enabled a feature that allows you to save any search for later use. A simple link will bring up your search results again (including all new additions). I have one for unread mail (using “is:unread“), one for pdf files (using “has:attachment AND pdf“), and one for emails from my wife (yes, I’m shamelessly sucking up). To use saved searches, simply do the following:
1. Enable Quick Links in your Labs settings (don’t forget to save changes  at the bottom of the settings page!):
 2. Search (using the standard Gmail search bar) and create your query like we did above.
3. Create a new link and give it a title you’ll remember:

4. Revel in how efficient you’ve become!

As a final note, remember that you can create quick links from any search you do in Gmail. Give it a try and let me know any brilliant searches you saved in the comments!

That should be enough for part 1. Still to come in the Gmail series:
- Remember better… Tasks, Calendar in Gmail
- Keep in contact better… Chat, Video, chat history!
- Organize better… labels and label colors, Contact lists

~ab

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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