Say you would like to find a message from a certain person. If you would only search for the name you’d find anything that matches it. Even is the person’s name is only mentioned in the e-mail. But if you use to: Amy you will only find the messages sent to Amy. No need even to use the exact e-mail address. Just use the name as it is displayed in the e-mails. Same goes for to, cc or bcc.
Another common one is finding messages in a certain location. If you just search for a term you will find anything that matches it, wherever it is. If you use in: inbox however you will only find messages from your inbox. Same goes for trash and spam, good for checking is an expected message accidentally landed in the spam folder, without having to buy medicines.
One I use often is searching within a certain label only. For this you can use label: projects to search through messages labeled with projects. Here you will start getting a little more advanced since you would usually combine it with another search them. Say I look for a project budget, I would search for label: project budget, or even for the latest not archived but still labeled budget I would look for label: project in: inbox budget. Good change that will give me what I look for at once.
Since we are combining anyway, this is where the good stuff starts. I would advise you to print this page and keep it handy so you can use it day to day and become familiar with it.
A last note is that you can also search messages sent or received during a certain period of time. Unfortunately dates should be in yyyy/mm/dd format and you can’t use today, yesterday, last week, last month and so on. Hopefully this will be added by Google at some point. Maybe they’ll even include: tomorrow and next week. That’ll be useful!
Terms you can use:
| Operator | Meaning |
| To: From: Cc: Bcc: | Mail exchanged with specific persons |
| In:inbox In: spam In: trash | Mail in a certain folder* |
| Labeled: labelname | Mail labeled with labelname |
| Is:starred Is: read Is:unread | You’re guessing it already? |
| Has: attachment Filename: | Mail with an attachment of with an attachment with a certain filename |
| After: Before: | Mail in a certain time period. Remember to use yyyy/mm/dd as date format. |
| “ ” | Quotes: exact phrase, say “project meeting” |
| OR | Mail matching one term OR another. OR must be in capitals. |
| - | Exclusion. Search for mail not containing a certain word. |
| () | Grouping. For example using to: amy (dinner OR movie) would give us messages from Amy that contain either of the words but not both. |
Here are a few additional useful (and undocumented) search/filter operators:
http://www.letterbar.com/3-undocumented-gmail-filters/
The most useful is probably the ‘deliveredto’ operator.