Where on earth did I put that email?
Emails are probably the most vital form of communication in the modern office.
Everything from quick reminders and office banter to exchanging legal documents and written order confirmations sit unsorted, often in the same mailbox.
Outlook and other email clients have plenty of options to help you sort the essentials from the every-day, but what if you’re looking for something in particular with no idea where you stored it?
Luckily, Outlook has some fantastic search options that should make finding that one email received years ago from the virtual haystack!
Advanced Find
When you click into the search bar at the top of Outlook, it’ll open the search tab options.
From here, you can click on Search Tools, and Advanced Find
The Advanced Find window will open, granting you much better search options which we’ll break down for you below.
Advanced Find searches aren’t limited to emails, you can drop down this list to search for tasks, appointments or many other details tracked in Outlook.
You can also break down where within Outlook you’d like to search with the In: browse dialog window.
When searching for messages, you can enter a word or phrase to search for. The In: field under the search field will let you tailor your search to matches in the subject only, subject and message body or any frequently used text field.
If this doesn’t narrow down your search enough, you can navigate to the More Choices tab.
Within the more choices menu, you can further split down your search via categories (Colour coding), Read vs unread, restrict to emails with or without attachments, or search only for emails that have been marked as important or been flagged.
The Advanced Tab
The Advanced tab is very detailed and very powerful. You can use the tools here to search for more or less anything. Have a look through the options and select the ones you’d like to filter by.
Most have Conditions such as IS for exact matches and Contains for partial information. This is useful for searching for an email from a particular customer where you don’t know who sent it
(Simply search Contains: @theircompanyaddress.com)
Once you’ve entered a criteria option, click add to list.
The above example will search for emails I have received from our support team where the word support was used in the message. Perhaps not the most useful example, but hopefully it demonstrates the level of complexity you can quickly build in this tool.
Running an advanced search without the wizard
Here’s one last advanced tip for anyone who wants to be an Outlook super searcher.
You can run advanced searches right from the default search bar if you know how to build a search. Once you get your head around how this works, you can run very detailed searches very quickly, but this is a complicated feature that resembles basic code.
Don’t worry, we’ll do our best to break it down slowly!
Let’s start by breaking an advanced search down.
This search will show any email I’ve sent to Nick, or mail sent to Nick by the support mailbox.
The search looks like this.
((from:”support@alphafirst.net” OR from: leslie-chilton@alphafirst.net) AND to:nick-burridge@alphafirst.net)
The first part of the search:
from:“support@alphafirst.net” OR from: leslie-chilton@alphafirst.net
tells Outlook to search for emails sent from the support mailbox OR my email address.
The second part:
AND to:nick-burridge@alphafirst.net
Tells Outlook to search only for emails that were sent TO nick-burridge@alphafirst.net
By putting AND into the search, you are telling Outlook that you are only looking for email that meets all of your search criteria.
The () brackets tell Outlook which parts of your search go together.
((from:”support@alphafirst.net” OR from: leslie-chilton@alphafirst.net) AND to:nick-burridge@alphafirst.net)
The set of brackets highlighted in red group the two senders I’m looking for together. It works like commas in sentence structure.
With the brackets around the FROM: section, you’re asking for emails from one address or the other to a specific sender
Without the brackets you’re asking for emails from the first address or emails from the second address that were sent to the to: address. You’ll get a completely different set of results.
Most Common Search Functions
To: Shows you all email sent to a certain address
From: shows you all email from a certain address
CC: shows you all email that an address was cc’d into
(Note that you can put part of an address into these searches, for example searching @alphafirst.net would return any email you’ve received from any of our staff)
Subject: Shows email with a certain word or phrase in the subject line
Body: Shows email with a certain word or phrase in the main text of an email
Before: dd/mm/yyyy will show you any email sent/received before the given date
After: dd/mm/yyyy will show you any email sent/received after the given date
Date: dd/mm/yyyy Will show you any email sent/received on the given date
(Date order for these might be different based on your regional settings)
has:attachment:True or has:attachment:False can be used to show only email with or without attachments.
You can also use these Operators to use several of these search tools together:
AND: Only show me email that meets this criteria or that criteria
OR: Show me any email that meets any of these criteria
(): surround search operators in brackets to separate them. For example
“Show me mail sent from @alphafirst.net with invoice or quote in the main message text.”
From: @alphafirst.net AND (Body:invoice OR Body:quote)
(You must always type operators in capitals)
There are many other functions that aren’t listed here. In fact, if you can think logically about what you’re looking for, there’s probably a syntax to search for it in outlook.
If you’re looking for a function not listed above, try searching for it on Google – or contact us and we’d be happy to help.
