Searching your emails on your mobile phone

What do I do?

I have a confession to make - I mainly use the native iphone mail app more than the gmail app but only because I get mail from a variety of different accounts and I keep them separated so I know what they are about.

You can get all of your emails sent into one gmail account but I don't because I make a rule for myself not to look at work emails when it is my day off.

So my regular email looks like this image to the left.  Lots of different inboxes and I only open one at a time.  However, I also use the gmail app which is native to most android phones for searching.

It mixes in all of the gmail accounts that I have, but once again this does not matter, because Google is the King of Search.  It allows me to search extensively through all my gmail accounts at once.

The search box allows you to search for a word.  Let me give you an example, I searched my gmail for the word "dog".  Apart from some very obvious ones, the results brought up a booking I have for the Indian Pacific Railway.  I wondered why that email had the word "dog" in it and after extensive searching through the email and then the attachments, I found small print in my booking contract that had information for people with guide dogs.


If that doesn't prove to you how Google is the King of Search, I don't know what will!  (The iphone mail search did not give the same results - only the obvious ones like "Dogo News.")

Searching in GMail Phone App

So how do you search in mobile Gmail?  Just open the app and write your word into the search bar at the top.  Or you can write in "from:_____" whoever it is from or "has:_________" for a word or attachment.  These are called operators and if you want to know more, you can find a list of these operators on this article (click here) about powerful search operators on gmail.  There are lots that you might find useful.

Once again, google is superior for searching.  If you get a lot of emails like I do and like to keep them all in one place, then gmail is definitely the mobile app for you.