A Closer Look at Search in Yahoo! Mail: Search within Attachments
One of the great features of Yahoo! mail client, the aptly named Yahoo! Mail, is that it provides unlimited storage space for your inbox. This means that as messages come in, you will feel no pressure to hit the delete button and the aforementioned messages will pile up. You can of course move them to specific folders and keep things organized, but the simple truth of the matter is that you will sometimes need to quickly access a particular message and to do this you will need a powerful search feature. Yahoo! Mail is capable of providing just that – a means of easily and quickly locating messages.
“With just a simple keyword search, like “orders”, we give you the option to filter search results by a whole host of options. Whether you want to narrow your results by Date, Folder, Sender etc. they are all listed for you in a very nice, clickable, list (right-hand side in the new Mail, left-hand side of Classic Mail). But that just scratches the surface of what you can do,” explains Program Manager with Yahoo! Mail, Andrew Molyneux.
There are more advanced options at your disposal, options that should make it easier for you to find whatever you are looking for. Let’s assume for a moment that you want to locate an email with the subject pictures; in this case you can type in subject:pictures in the search box. If you want to locate a specific picture and you can remember its name, simply type in subject:“NAME” from:X where NAME is the name of the picture and X is the name of the person who sent you the email.
Leaving pictures aside, you should also know that you can search for specific types of attachments and you can even search inside attachments. Andrew Molyneux again: “Did you know that you can search for different types of attachments using search in Yahoo! Mail? And even better, you can search INSIDE attachments. Yes, that’s right, I said inside. I know what you’re saying - “That’s not possible from a web mail provider.” Well it is possible, and you can do search inside Word documents, Excel and PDFs with Yahoo! Mail. I’m not aware of any other free Web mail provider that does that!”
If one of your friends sent you an attachment with topic X, and you want to locate it, then all you have to do is type in from:FRIEND attachment: “topic X” where FRIEND is the person who sent you the email and topic X is the item you were looking for. To top things off, Yahoo! Mail even provides a preview of the attachment and highlights the part with your query.
In related news, Yahoo! has introduced a new Creative Commons filter in Image Search (details here) and has added a sports related shortcut to Yahoo! Search (details here).
“With just a simple keyword search, like “orders”, we give you the option to filter search results by a whole host of options. Whether you want to narrow your results by Date, Folder, Sender etc. they are all listed for you in a very nice, clickable, list (right-hand side in the new Mail, left-hand side of Classic Mail). But that just scratches the surface of what you can do,” explains Program Manager with Yahoo! Mail, Andrew Molyneux.
There are more advanced options at your disposal, options that should make it easier for you to find whatever you are looking for. Let’s assume for a moment that you want to locate an email with the subject pictures; in this case you can type in subject:pictures in the search box. If you want to locate a specific picture and you can remember its name, simply type in subject:“NAME” from:X where NAME is the name of the picture and X is the name of the person who sent you the email.
Leaving pictures aside, you should also know that you can search for specific types of attachments and you can even search inside attachments. Andrew Molyneux again: “Did you know that you can search for different types of attachments using search in Yahoo! Mail? And even better, you can search INSIDE attachments. Yes, that’s right, I said inside. I know what you’re saying - “That’s not possible from a web mail provider.” Well it is possible, and you can do search inside Word documents, Excel and PDFs with Yahoo! Mail. I’m not aware of any other free Web mail provider that does that!”
If one of your friends sent you an attachment with topic X, and you want to locate it, then all you have to do is type in from:FRIEND attachment: “topic X” where FRIEND is the person who sent you the email and topic X is the item you were looking for. To top things off, Yahoo! Mail even provides a preview of the attachment and highlights the part with your query.
In related news, Yahoo! has introduced a new Creative Commons filter in Image Search (details here) and has added a sports related shortcut to Yahoo! Search (details here).
