Many of you use Gmail as your primary email service, and if you’ve been using Google for a while, you might be staring at thousands of unread emails. This can make it difficult to find old emails when you need them. This is where Gmail’s search bar comes in, and chances are you haven’t been using it to its full potential.

In this post, we'll explain how email search in Gmail works, the different ways you can search, and how to use them in Gmail.

The search bar in Gmail is a powerful tool that can provide results you might not have expected from the email service. Longtime users would have used this search bar to search for emails with specific keywords or from a specific sender, but there’s so much more you can do with it.

You can use the built-in filter option to search for emails that meet certain criteria such as specific senders, recipients, subject, presence or absence of specific words, size, and date. These filters can be applied to search for emails and then you can assign a specific task to the emails that meet your search requirements. The tasks can be assigned to multiple emails that meet your criteria and you can perform any of the following functions with them: archive, mark as read, star, forward, delete, always/never mark as important, prevent them from being sent to spam, or add them to a label or category.