I have a ton of email in my Gmail archive, and sometimes need to dig through older email. Problem is, if I do a search, it shows me all the most recent matches first when what I really want to do is, say, search for messages more than a year old, or 12-18 months ago or similar. Is there any way to do a more sophisticated search than just by keyword?

As part of migrating from an older iMac to my new Macbook Pro (which I love) I went through and axed a ton of unwanted email from Microsoft Entourage. I know that I can copy my mail archive, address book, etc, by moving the contents of Documents:Microsoft User Data:Office 2008 Identities, but my question is whether there's any way to compact, compress or rebuild my archive before I do so?

I just noticed that one of the actions I can take on a discussion thread in Google's Gmail service is to "mute" it. What the heck is that? Something to do with audio playback, perhaps?