Find old or new emails by date

Gmail’s handy drop-down search box lets you search for emails around a certain date, but you can also type “before:yyyy/mm/dd” or “after:yyyy/mm/dd” in the box instead to find messages before or after a specific day in the calendar. It’s handy for finding and deleting all of the emails that are more than five years old, for example.

Create some new addresses

Have you ever noticed that dots don’t matter in Gmail addresses? [email protected] is the same as [email protected], so you can use alternative addresses for different purposes (like signing up for accounts online or registering for email newsletters) and then automatically filter the incoming messages accordingly based on the address used.

Turn emails into tasks

Did you know you can quickly convert an email into a task inside Gmail? As with the previous tip, the secret is in the “More” menu above your messages – choose “Add to Tasks” and Gmail creates a new entry in the pop-up Tasks window, together with a link back to the message in question. It’s handy if you want to archive a conversation but receive a reminder about it later on.

Find large attachments

Whether you’ve paid to upgrade the amount of email space you have available or you’re sticking with the free 15 GB that Google gives you, large attachments can eat up that space quickly (especially if you’re storing messages locally too). Use the “larger_than:” operator in the search box, so “larger_than:10m” finds all emails larger than 10 MB in size.