Search Part 2

January 25th, 2007

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Last week you’ll recall I walked you through a small sampling of what you can do with search in the Yahoo! Mail Beta. I only scratched the surface in that last post, so I thought I’d do a little more advanced tutorial here – but I promise there’s no exam at the end. I also promise a little “hidden” function at the end that will, I hope, make you say “cool”.

Searching Attachments
Did you know that you can search for attachments in the Yahoo! Mail Beta? And even better, you can search INSIDE attachments. Yes, that’s right, I said inside. “Come on now! That’s not possible from a web mail provider,” I hear you saying. Well it is possible, and you can do it with the Yahoo! Mail Beta. I’m not aware of any other free Web mail provider that does that!

Here’s how. Remember those shortcuts I talked about last week? Let’s use one of those to help us. I’ll use my friend and colleague Tim again. He’s always sending me attachments of one form or another. In the search box, I can type: from:tim@emailaddress attachment: “party invitation”. Why do I care about this? Well, since Tim sends me so many emails with attachments to me, this way I can find the document Tim sent me a while back via the term “party invitation” inside the attachment. You can substitute your keywords for the information you want to search.

Other ways to search attachments
There are plenty of other things you can do with the attachment shortcuts. You are able to search for an attachment name, type and number of attachments. Here’s a table for you that lists out the shortcuts.

Shortcut	Description	Examples
attachment	The “attachment:” shortcut can be used to search for some text contained in any attachments to the messages. This only applies to textual attachments (it won’t search through an image, for instance).	attachment:invitation
attachmentname	The “attachmentname:” shortcut can be used to search for messages containing attachments with a certain word in the filename.	attachmentname:invitation.pdf attachmentname:invitation
attachmentcount	The “attachmentcount:” shortcut can be used to search for messages with a specified number of attachments. You can use either an exact number or you can use greater-than/less-than to indicate you want messages with more than/less than a specified number of attachments.	attachmentcount:1 attachmentcount:>0 attachmentcount:
attachmenttype	The “attachmenttype:” shortcut can be used to search for messages containing a certain type of attachment (PDFs, for example).	attachmenttype:pdf attachmenttype:msword attachmenttype:excel attachmenttype:text attachmenttype:image attachmenttype:jpeg

Ok, so where’s the ‘hidden’ function?
Let me show you something that I think you’ll enjoy doing. Open up a message in your mailbox. At the top of the message, where the subject line is (in that purple header section), move your mouse over the subject line, hold down the CTRL key and click your mouse button.

That’s – CTRL and click over the subject line in a mail message. This automatically generates a search of your mailbox for all the mail with that subject. Go ahead, give it a try.

Happy searching (again)!!
Andrew – Yahoo Mail! Beta Team