Google Apps Hacks

112 GOOGLE APPS HACKS

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To make all of this possible, you can use Gmail lters, which are based on Gmail’s search syntax. A

basic search in Gmail looks for exact matches in the whole of an email; its subject, its “from” eld,

“to” eld, message body, and more. The following search returns all mails containing the words

“invitation” and “inquiry”:

invitation inquiry

If you want to nd emails containing either of each word, use the OR operator. Make sure to write the

operator in all uppercase—although keywords used in searches are not case-sensitive, this operator is:

invitation OR inquiry

In the following search, the pipe character “|” is a synonym for OR, and parentheses group the

terms together (this means that the | applies only to those two grouped terms). To exclude certain

words, use the minus operator, as before “join”:

(invitation | inquiry) -join

Quotes ensure that only the entire phrase is found:

subject:”partnership offer”

A slight variation of the previous query, shown here, searches for both words in the subject line but

not necessarily as a full phrase. Note that there’s no space after the colon:

subject:(partnership offer)

Use the from: or to: operators followed by a colon to search only among sender or recipients:

from:arthur OR from:[e-mail]

Similarly, you can use the operators subject: to only search in email subjects, ...