Find What You’re Searching For, Faster
The search features contained within Gmail are quite powerful, and there are a number of search operators that you can make use of. In this post we’ll be focusing on date-based search filters.
Finding messages within a certain date range
Suppose you want to find all messages before 31st December 2016. Well, you can search like this:
before: 2016/12/31
Note that the search date format is yyyy/mm/dd. For example:
before: yyyy/mm/dd
If you want to find all messages after a certain date, just search like this:
after: 2017/01/01
You can combine these two search operators to find messages between certain periods of time, for example:
before:2016/12/1 after:2016/11/28
See Search By Date In Action:
“older_than” and “newer_than” funtions
What if you wanted to find extremely old messages, say more than 2 years past? You can search for them like this:
older_than:2y
(Note the underscore “_” in “older_than”. “2y” refers to “2 years”. You can also use “m” for months and “d” for days)
Here’s another example in which you’d find messages newer than 2 days:
newer_than:2d
Or, perhaps you’d like to find all messages older than 5 months:
older_than:5m
You can also combine “older_than” and “newer_than” search operators to:
older_than:2m newer_than:3m
While combining date ranges, keep in mind that the date range should be valid. For example, the following search doesn’t make sense because it asks for a time range that doesn’t exist:
older_than:2m newer_than:1m
See the date range search in action:
