How to Search Messages Within a Specific Date Range in Gmail Search Text Box

With the current Search Options provided by Gmail, you don’t really able to search messages within a specific date range as defined. You may only able to search messages based the date range as specified in the drop down list, such as 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 6 months and 1 year from certain date. If you would like Gmail to only return you a list of messages within a specific date range as you want, you can assign a date range with proper syntax in the basic search box directly by following below steps.

1. Login to Gmail.

2. Go to Search Mail text box as located on the top of the page.

3. You can filter message by sender, recipient, subject, before and after of a specific date range. Type the search string according to below syntax:

from:xxx@abc.com to:yyy@xyz.com subject:greeting after:YYYY/MM/DD before:YYYY/MM/DD

from: is to indicate the email address of a sender, to: is to indicate the email address of recipient, subject: is the message subject which you want to search for, after: and before: is the date you can define to only return you the list of messages within the date range. For instance, if you only want to search from a specific sender within a specific date range, you can type your searching string as below:

from:john@yahoo.com after:2009/07/01 before:2009/05/01

4. Click Search Mail button to start searching messages based on the searching criteria as defined above.

Hopefully these simple steps will help you to define more accurate email searching at your own preference.