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Gmail
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Gmail: The only 5 search filters you need
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Hey friends,
I love Gemini, I really do. But it can’t find emails in Gmail to save its life (they’re literally BOTH GOOGLE PRODUCTS).
So here are the 5 manual search filters I still use daily because, apparently, knowing how to search beats waiting for AI to figure it out.
#1 - from:
First up, the operator you’ll use constantly. When you know who sent the email, combining ‘from:’ with quotation marks for exact matching gets you there instantly.
How it works: Type ‘from:john.smith@company.com “Q4 budget”’ and Gmail finds that exact email from John about the Q4 budget.
The quotation marks are crucial here. Without them, Gmail searches for emails containing either “Q4” OR “budget”. With them, it looks for that exact phrase.
#2 - in:sent
How it works: Use ‘in:sent’ before any keyword or recipient email. For example, ‘in:sent proposal‘ shows all sent emails containing “proposal”. Or get specific with ‘in:sent sarah@example.com‘ to see everything you’ve sent to Sarah.
#3 - has:attachment
This is extremely useful when you know that presentation is somewhere in your inbox, attached to some email, from someone, at some point.
How it works: ‘has:attachment‘ returns all emails with attachments. The real power comes when you combine it with other operators. Try ‘from:marketingperson@company.com has:attachment‘ to find all attachments from your marketing team.
Pro tip: Combine this with date ranges when you vaguely remember when someone sent you that file.
#4 - is:unread
This one’s particularly powerful for those of us using the Inbox Zero workflow. Here’s what happens: emails skip your main inbox and go straight to labels based on your filters.
This is (obviously) great for organization, but terrible when you need to find what you haven’t read yet.
How it works: ‘is:unread‘ reveals every single unread email across all your labels and folders. No more clicking through each label wondering if you missed something important.
#5 - label:[label]
Finally, the operator I probably use most. If you’re like me and have labels for different projects, this turns Gmail into a project management tool.
How it works: ‘label:Project-Alpha‘ instantly shows every email related to Project Alpha. No clicking through the sidebar, no scrolling to find that specific label.
Bonus: Those Smart Chips Below the Search Bar
After you run any search, look below the search bar. Gmail shows these filter chips that let you narrow things down even further without typing anything else.
My go-to secondary filters:
- Date range chip: Perfect when you kinda remember seeing that email “sometime last month”
- Most relevant/Most recent toggle: Switches between Gmail’s smart sorting and chronological order
Hope you find these helpful! 😁
Jeff
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