Yahoo! Mail Beta Advanced Search Explained

I have been using my Yahoo! Mail account since the late 90’s and am sort of a fan to their new Yahoo! Mail beta, which is a AJAX powered mailbox meaning you will never have page loads again! I agree it is sort of cranky in the slower connections, but with my Airtel Broadband power, impossible is nothing (Yea, I worked in Airtel, so am biased!).

The new interface of Yahoo did not have a advanced search feature like the previous version which allowed me to search though mails with any keyword in any field like the from, to, subject and body. This has been changed in the new version and here are a few Yahoo Hacks which you can use to find the message you want to. But I will not be teaching you to hack Yahoo! Mail accounts or anything, if you are looking for that, go elsewhere!

Find a phrase

Put the phrase in quotes. ‘Bike for sale’. ‘Desktop application’.
‘Practice times’. Etc. Mail searches for those words together in that
order.

Search within Subjects of messages

Looking for an email titled something like Dave’s Birthday Party? If
you’re not sure if those were the exact words, but you feel strongly
that ‘party’ was in there somewhere, then type:

subject:party &/or, subject:dave &/or, subject: dave’s birthday
(no spaces)

Find messages from a person or company

Example: Search for messages from Roger by typing:

from:Roger
(no spaces)

Find messages about a person (or a company) but not from that person
or company

Example: Search for messages that mention Laura but aren’t from Laura by
typing

laura -from:laura
name(space)(hyphen)from:name

You’re telling Yahoo! Mail to search for ‘Laura’ messages, minus any
that are from Laura.

Find messages/RSS feeds containing an item, but not from a specific
source

Example: Search for ‘Mexico’, but don’t show results from the Times

mexico -from:Times
(search term)(space)(hyphen)from:source

You’re telling Yahoo! Mail to search for ‘mexico’ messages, minus any
that are from the Times.

Messages/RSS feeds containing something, and not containing something
else

Example: Search for ‘France’ but don’t show any results containing
‘Paris’.

France -Paris
(search term)(space)(hyphen)(item you want excluded)

You’re telling Yahoo! Mail to search for ‘France’ messages, minus any
that mention Paris.

These are some of the basic searches to find the emails you want to. I use these yahoo search hacks all the time to find my messages since i like my inbox neatly organized and put into folders. So this search feature comes in handy to my uses. Soon this week I will post about how you can use the search to find emails with attachments and things.