Many of us have had our Gmail accounts for a lot of years now and, in many cases, for over a decade. Considering the average person receives thousands of emails per year, many of us have a huge backlog of emails in our inbox or various folders. But what happens when we need to find one of these old emails? The problem gets even harder when the email isn't properly labeled, has no unique keywords to search for, or can't remember the sender/receiver.
As you'd expect from any reasonable email client, Gmail allows you to search for emails by date, although doing it is not quite as obvious as it could be. There are two ways to search by date, via the Search Options menu, and using a certain syntax in the search bar. We'll go over both here.
Search by Date using Search Options
The first option is probably more intuitive for many users since it uses a GUI of options. To access these options, click on the icon to the right of the search bar:
Once clicked, the menu will open and present you with a number of different filtering options, one of them being "Date within". This option will help you find all emails within X number of days or months of the chosen date.
So, for example, if you knew that you received the email right around Jan. 5th, 2022, then you'd choose "1 day" and then choose "2022/01/05" in the date picker.
After clicking "Search", Gmail will use your parameters to fill in the search query for you and return only emails within the date range you chose.
But what about the first email at the top, received on Jan. 7th? This is because Gmail filters emails according to UTC instead of local time. This email was actually received on Jan. 6th according to UTC. However, Gmail displays the date according to local time but uses UTC for filtering emails.
Note: The date following the "after" operator is included, while the date after the "before" operator is excluded. For example, the query "after: 2024/12/01 before: 2024/12/31" will return emails received on or after December 1, 2024, and before December 31, 2024 (excluding December 31).
Search by Date using Advanced Syntax
The more advanced way to search emails is actually similar to above, but skips the step in which you use the GUI to pick dates. Here, we'll show you how to use the date syntax for more options on restricting by date.
This can be achieved by entering a query in the search bar with the following format:
before:YYYY/MM/DD
or
after:YYYY/MM/DD
Gmail will then show you emails received before/after the date specified. For example:
This query was run on January 7, 2022. Note that it also returned an email conversation dated January 3, which is after the specified date (2022/01/01). This is because one or more emails in this conversation were received prior to January 1.
Note that this search is less restrictive than the GUI method since it only places an upper or lower bound date. So, both bounds aren't required for the query. We'll take a closer look at that in the next section.
Relative Date Operators
Gmail date search also has two more operators similar to "before" and "after". They are called "older_than" and "newer_than". These operators do not require a specific date. They are used to filter out emails based on the current date dynamically. For instance:
older_than:1y
The above query returns all the emails that were received more than a year ago.
Searching Between Dates
You can be even more restrictive in your search query and set a before and after date. To do this, simply use both versions of the query above in the search bar. For example:
after:2021/12/27 before:2021/12/28
This query will only return emails between Dec. 27th, 2021 and Dec. 28th, 2021:
You can also combine these operators. For example:
newer_than:2m before:2024/12/01
The above query filters out those emails from the last two months that were received before December 1.
Combining Date with Other Search Criteria
What if you want to filter only those emails received in the last two months that contain an attachment? Gmail date search allows you to combine date operators with other operators to achieve this.
Enter the date filter query in the search bar, then select "Has attachment".
The above query was run on 09-12-2024.
Similarly, you can filter out emails by date from a specific sender or receiver or those that are unread.
Conclusion
Gmail's search bar can be used for some pretty advanced searching, more than just searching keywords within an email or for email addresses. Take some time to learn the various advanced syntax and you'll find that you're much more productive when working with your email!
