Unlike desktop email clients, Gmail lacks a viewing mechanism to sort emails by sender, date range, subject, website domain, and other criteria. These important functions have been superseded by a universal search box where you’re expected to use different search operators to find the desired messages.
This, in reality, makes searching for older and frequent emails more difficult. If you had deleted parts of a message chain, then you would lose track of the original email and its replies. The search box will surely return the remaining emails, but they won’t be arranged in any order of importance unless you remember the dates.
As a better alternative to the search box, you can use various filters which substitute for the lack of a viewing mechanism. The tips below will neatly sort your emails based on any criteria you’d typically use with desktop email clients.
Sort Gmail by Sender
To sort emails by sender names, enter the sender initially in the search box. If you don’t remember the sender name, you can search for it in your Google contacts. Gmail displays the complete sender email address and name as soon as you enter a few initials. To complete the search, click the magnifying glass icon “show search results.”
A new pop-up window will open with all Gmail filters. The sender name will be displayed in the has the words field, which you can copy-paste into the from field. Click Search to proceed.
Now only those emails which were sent by that specific sender described by you will be displayed. They are neatly arranged in a descending order from the current date.
If your association with the sender goes way back, you can further customize the date range from the custom range field. This will help you retrieve all the older emails from the specific sender.
All emails from a sender within a specific start and end date are now on display. They will be neatly sorted in order.
Sort Gmail by Website Domain
Gmail also lets you sort emails based on website domains. This is helpful if you exchanged replies with one or more persons whose emails are based on a common domain, or you subscribed to a blog, newsletter, Facebook or YouTube channels. If the website is the only thing you have, enter the text: *@domain name in the From field. Click Search to proceed.
All emails from the specific domain will be displayed in your inbox. If there are multiple senders in that domain, you can further customize the results using the From field.
Sort Gmail by Subject
Sorting Gmail by subject is easier. As soon as you enter the subject in the search box, it will be displayed in the has the words field. Now you only have to copy-paste it into the Subject field and click Search to proceed.
All emails are now sorted based on the subject in the email display.
Sort Gmail by Date Range
Sorting Gmail by date is most complicated. It has the least intuitive display compared to regular email clients, which simply let you sort the emails datewise on the main page itself. With Gmail, you have to go one level deeper to replicate a similar display.
You can set the start and end date using the calendar and date within fields. The date range will be displayed based on “after” and “before” the specified date.
Depending on the query, the filter above will give you many pages of emails. It’s time-consuming to sort through each and every page of the customized date range. Luckily, there is a faster method.
Go to the URL bar where you will be able to see the page number of the current page of dated email displays. It can easily be modified to check the emails for a specific narrow range of dates.
Keep modifying the page value till you are within the exact date range you were looking for.
Despite being a robust and popular email application, Gmail has too many blind spots to intuitively sort your emails. You can’t easily sort Gmail inbox by sender or any other criteria. With these techniques, however, you can better organize your email.
Featured Image: Gmail en OME
Sayak Boral is a technology writer with over eleven years of experience working in different industries including semiconductors, IoT, enterprise IT, telecommunications OSS/BSS, and network security. He has been writing for MakeTechEasier on a wide range of technical topics including Windows, Android, Internet, Hardware Guides, Browsers, Software Tools, and Product Reviews.
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