I hadn’t realised until just this minute that Gmail allows a query syntax similar to that of Lookout. Lookout’s search query syntax is so intuitive that I typed it into my Gmail search box without even realising, but when it returned the mails I actually wanted I was amazed! It’s all probably in the documentation somewhere, but I really hadn’t noticed.

If you’ve used Lookout before you’ll know exactly what kind of things you can do:

• subject:fred will return all the mails with ‘fred’ in the title
• from:fred will return all the mails sent by someone with ‘fred’ in their name or email address
• subject:fred will return all the mails with ‘fred’ in the title
• to:fred will return all the mails you’ve sent to fred
• to:fred has:attachment will return all the mails you’ve sent to fred and have an attachment

In fact, if you click “Show search options” next to the search box and type some values in the boxes, then the exact query syntax that was used is shown at the top of your results like this:

Happy searching!