Gmail is our favorite email service for both personal and official communications. It allows you to contact other parties from browsers, desktop, and mobile apps and thereby stay connected with the updates.
Gmail tools and add-ons are another reason why we stick to Google’s email service. They help us to improve work productivity and expand the scope of connecting each other. No other email provider can claim such a huge library of tools. Right?
We receive several emails in Gmail inbox every day. The figures may differ based on your communication level and usage.
Can you locate a Gmail email that you received a couple of months or years back?
Yes, you can.
Today we’ll tell you how to search Gmail emails by date, time, and age.
Search Gmail emails by date
Search your Gmail emails by date. Enter your desired date (2023/04/10 in the screenshot) in the search box followed by the ‘before:’ or ‘after:’ operator.
before: YYYY/MM/DD – To get emails before a particular date.
after: YYYY/MM/DD – To get emails after a particular date.
You can replace before with older and after with newer as well.
Search Gmail emails within a time period
Use both before and after operators together to recover emails within a time period.
Before: 2023/01/25 after: 2023/01/13 will display emails you received from January 13, 2023, to January 25, 2023.
Search Gmail emails within a time period and subject
Find emails within a time period having a particular subject.
Before: 2023/04/08 after: 2023/03/30 trial will display emails you received from March 30, 2023 to April 08, 2023 that contains ‘trial’ in the subject line.
Some other examples,
before: YYYY/MM/DD after: YYYY/MM/DD from: amy – Return emails from a certain sender.
before: YYYY/MM/DD after: YYYY/MM/DD category:updates – Return emails from a certain category.
Search Gmail emails by age
Gmail also allows you to search for emails by their age. Enter ‘older_than: 4d’ query in the search box to return your emails older than 4 days. In the same way, you can search for emails older than 2 months (‘older_than: 2m’) or 2 years (‘older_than: 2y’).
older_than: 2m – Mails older than 2 months.
newer_than: 1y – Mails newer than 1 year.
Some other examples,
older_than: 1m has:attachment-Mails older than 1 month along with attachments.
newer_than: 1y filename: resume.pdf – Mails newer than 1 year with a certain attachment.
Search Gmail emails by time
Digital Inspiration explained this method to us in quite an interesting way. Here you have to convert the desired date and time to Epoch time first.
Epoch time is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (UTC).
For instance, I want to get the list of emails received before 10th April 2023, 12.26 pm. After converting to Epoch, it will be 1681128000.
Similarly, you can search emails between two times like the following or by subject, label, etc.
before: 1681128000 after: 1677672000 – List emails in between 12 am 1st March 2023 to 12 am 10th April 2023.
before: 1681128000 statement – List emails before 12 am, 20th January 2017 with word statement anywhere on the subject or content.
Search Gmail Emails by name
Want to find Gmail emails that you received from a certain person?
Enter your sender’s name in the search box and Gmail will show email addresses in your contact book, and messages containing the same name either in the From or To fields.
Click the drop-down menu from the right corner of your Search box to get advanced search options.
Type the email address of the person to search. Fill up other fields that you know. Click the drop-down menu on the Search box and choose ‘Mail & Spam & Trash’ from the list.
Hit the Search button.
That’s it.
Read How to Read Gmail Messages without Opening Emails
