Is there a way to constrain my Google Mail (Gmail) searches to just those messages that I’ve starred? I’m pretty diligent about adding a star to those messages that are important, now can I search through them?
For a company that’s built its fortune on search and search engines, it’s no surprise that Google’s Gmail service includes a lightning fast, quite powerful search system and search language. The problem is learning how it works so that you can move quickly through searches that include just those messages with a star, just those with attachments, etc.
Fortunately there’s an advanced search window that you can use to teach you the search language. Not sure that’s its intention, but that’s okay, it works great and it will unquestionably help you become a faster, better Gmail searcher and user.
To start, let’s just look at a typical Gmail screen:
As you can see, I’ve clicked on the star for two of the messages in my inbox, one about Sherlock Holmes and one about the NoCo Maker Faire.
Here’s a fun tip: Click on the star icon more than once. You can cycle through different colors, not just be stuck with yellow!
But what if I want to search for just starred email messages?
To get to the secret advanced search box, click on the tiny downward facing grey triangle on the very right of the big white search box input field. See it? Just to the left of the white magnifying glass on the light blue button background.
A click and you’ll see this:
Still not obvious how you search just for starred messages, is it?
Don’t panic, though. Just click on “All Mail” adjacent to “Search:” on the very first line…
Ahh, there it is! So that’s how you set up a search for just starred messages. Easy enough, once you know.
But where this gets really interesting is when you actually do the search, because then the search box picks up the specific predicate that’ll produce the search desired:
Can you see the search box? It shows is:starred. That’s it.
Next time you want to search through just your starred email messages, simply add “is:starred” to the search.
Want to also constraint it to just those messages that also have attachments? You can do that too:
The only caveat I have is that while Gmail works great with other search criteria, for some reason it seems to get confused about attachments, so my search results for the above query are messages that are starred, but might or might not have an attachment. Oh well. Otherwise now you know how to search for email that has a star!