Get more out of Gmail

As long as I've been using Gmail since 2002, there have been a few important features missing in Gmail UI that I found most annoying and yet even after nearly 10 years Google is not doing anything to fix these 'issues'. These missing features not some obscure and little used features but one which most users of Gmail have found wanting too, and these being:

• ability to sort email by sender, subject or date
• ability to select emails with attachment.

Google has realised these short-comings for years but reluctant to have fixes for these but instead provided with ways to use their Google search engine itself to filter the emails you're after, and I have compiled a list of these search parameters which provides an indirect solutions to the missing features I mentioned above.

By default, Google sorts emails by date, with the most recent ones listed first. So, if you want to view emails from last year or two years ago, simple filter emails up to a certain date. To search old emails, enter the search string below:

• before:2008/01/01(returns all emails up to 31 Dec 2007)

The following are a list of some of the other search terms that I found useful:

• after:YYYY/MM/DD (shows only emails after the date specified)
• has:attachments (show only emails which have attachments, e.g. docs, images, video, etc.
• filename:abc.doc (shows email which has the attachment abc.doc).
• to:someone@gmailcom (shows all emails sent to a given person)
• from:sender@gmail.com (shows all emails from a given person)
• is:unread (shows only unread emails)
• is:chat (show only the chat messages)

Of course, you can combine several of these filters to look for a very specific set of emails, e.g.

• is:unread from:nokia.com before:2011/02/01 has:attachment chocolate
  
will show only the unread emails from anyone from the domain nokia.com before 1 Feb 2011 containing the word 'chocolate'.

GMAIL LABS


In addition to these search filters, there are a few experimental add-ons for Gmail from the Labs section which are worth including to your gmail account. To use these features, click on Settings-Mail Setting:

and in the mail Settings page click on Labs tab. In the Labs tab, you will find a whole host of tweaks and Add-Ons to Gmail and I found the following quite useful.




Message sneak peak
Rather than opening the email, this feature allows you to right-click on the message and a pop-up window opens revealing the message content.  

Refresh POP/IMAP accounts
 If like me, you have email accounts before started using Gmail, and you have linked all of these accounts into Gmail then you'd know that your POP/IMAP emails don't always arrive into the mailbox in the same frequency as your normal Gmail messages. This is because, Gmail uses heuristic rules to determine how often it should fetch emails from external accounts. This could mean that an important email you've been waiting might be taking hours to arrive because Gmail doesn't go and fetch it. In this case, this Refresh button will force Gmail to fetch your external emails.  

Move Icon Column
By default, the icon column is on the right hand side of the messages, but this simple feature swaps the icon column to the left-hand side, so any attachments in the messages are clearly visible. Simples!  

Mark as Read button
If you have lots of emails you don't have time to read but you don't want to delete them either, marking them as Read will remove them from the no. of emails unread list.

Sender's Time
This little utility shows the time the sender sent the email (at his/her location), rather than the time of your physical location where the email was received. The Sender's time is displayed when you click on Show Details link inside the message. This is useful if you want to know if you should respond the sender later on or pick up the phone to call them or wait till tomorrow.