How to Search better in Outlook 2010

When you send and receive lots of mails in outlook, it always becomes a trouble to find mail in the bunch of mails lying in the inbox. To search any mail, we usually use search option to search mail, but often it ends up showing irrelevant or too many result. For example, I want to search mail from Merwyn Noronha and while searching with the name Merwyn will return result including mails where the name also appears in part of the message body though you meant to search mails received from that person. However, Outlook is smart enough to narrow down the search result and show result which are relevant and correct. For better searching on outlook, you can specify the parameter with the search term. Suppose, I want to search all mails from Merwyn Noronha having attachments, or I want to search mails with specific category assigned. If you use Outlook often for work purpose in office, then this should be considered very important since in the end, you save a lot of time and can help you to grow productively. However, this parameter are very easy to use and would hardly take few minutes to understand these parameters.

In Outlook 2010, it has two search option available i.e the Search Contextual Tab in the Ribbon and the Search Suggestion List.

In Outlook, You can filter your search result using parameters. This parameter can be used to search mail accordingly to search mail by sender name, searching by keyword, searching mail having attachments, search by flagged messages and much more. There are many parameters available in outlook which could be used to filter out the search results. However, we would be showing few parameters, which are usually used for daily task.

 

Searching by Sender name:

Suppose, I want to filter the search results for mails received from Merwyn Noronha, I will add a parameter “FROM” in the search box and sender name.

from:(Sender Name)

Searching by Sender name having no attachment

Suppose, I want to filter the search results for mails received from Merwyn Noronha having no attachment, I will add a parameter “FROM” in the search box and sender name along with new parameter, i.e. “hasattachments:false” (If true is added, then it will display search result having the attachments for the mail)

from:(Sender Name) hasattachments:yes

Searching keyword in Subject line

To filter the search results for mails which is having certain text in subject.

subject:(keywords)

Searching attachment with specific Format

To filter the search results for mails having attachments with the specific file format, Suppose, I want to search result having attachment with .Docx Format (Word document) or .pptx Format(PowerPoint document) or PDF Format, etc.

hasattachments:(format name)

Below are some more parameters for Outlook,

Search Result	Parameters
Sent mail to Recipient Name	to:(Recipient Name)
Sent mail to Recipient Name in CC	cc:(Recipient Name)
Sent mail to Recipient Name in BCC	bcc:(Recipient Name)
Mail tagged with followup flag	followupflag:followup flag
Keyword contains in the message body	contents:keyword
Mail sent on today	sent:today
Mail sent on yesterday	sent:yesterday
Mail sent on this week	sent:this week
Mail sent on last week	sent:last week
Mail sent on this month	sent:this month
Mail sent on this year	sent:this year
Mail received on today	received:today
Mail received on yesterday	received:yesterday
Mail received on this week	received:this week
Mail received on last week	received:last week
Mail received on this month	received:this month
Mail received on last month	received:last month
Mail received on this year	received:this year
Mails Having attachment	hasattachments:yes
Mails Having no attachment	hasattachments:no
Mails attachment with different file format	attachment:.docx (replace .docx with file format to search)
Mails attachment having content with following keyword	attachment:facebook
Mails which are unread	read:no
Mails which are read	read:yes
Mail importance level	importance:high
Search by Categories	category:=”Blue Category” (replace “blue” name with other categories name i.e yellow, orange, red,etc.)
Mails sent to me in TO section	to:Your name
Mails sent to me in CC section	cc:Your Name

However, You can also access this search parameter through the Search Tools Ribbon, In Refine section of Search tools, you can find all the search parameter to filter the search result.

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