Searching in BroncoMail and Google Apps for Employees

Have you ever had to find that one email message in a pile of other email messages in your account? This article should provide some help with quickly finding information in your BroncoMail or Google Apps for Employees account.

As with all of the applications in the Google Apps for Education suite, a great feature of the Gmail application is it brings the power of Google’s search technology to your email. The trick is learning to harness the power of the search. There are several search strings that I use every day:

• from:peter – allows me to find all the messages from Peter.
• to:mark – allows me to find all the messages I (or others) sent to Mark.

You can also combine search terms:

• from:peter to:mark – this will find all the messages from Peter addressed to Mark.
• to:mark icons – this will find all the messages with Mark in the To: field, and the word “icon” in the subject or body of the message.

Another really handy search string is

• is:unread – will find all the unread messages in my entire account.

You can combine this tool with the power of search strings to really get the most out of your Google Apps email account.

Google added a set of tools for Gmail called Labs. One of the available Labs is Quick Links. This tool allows one-click access for ‘frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.’ The Quick Links tool can be enabled by clicking Settings in Gmail (at top-right), then Labs, and locate and enable Quick Links.