This is a quick post for my own reference to show how to search Gmail by date range. I often write little tips like this for myself so I have somewhere easy to reference them as I forget this sort of stuff all the time 🙂
Server emails and purging the old ones
I get a lot of emails from servers addressed to a specific email address sending reports and all sorts of other stuff. I have filters in Gmail to put them into a specific folder automatically, skipping the inbox and I never actually see them. Emails reporting errors don’t get filtered in the same way so those always hit my inbox.
So these error emails are pretty much just there in case I need to look at them for some reason. Every now and then I like to purge out older server emails and the easiest way is to search for them by date range and then delete.
Searching by label and date range
These server emails get filtered into a label called “Servers”. To search for them prior to e.g. May 1st 2011 (so all emails from April 30th and earlier) do a search like this:
label:servers before:2011/05/01
If you wanted to search for any email between say May 23rd and May 29th 2011, do this:
after:2011/05/23 before:2011/05/30
Note that the “after” date needs to be the date searching from (it includes that date) but “before” needs to be the day after you want to search to.
