Find emails from a specific period

When you roughly know when a message arrived, bounding the search with two dates is an alternative to searching by word.

The query

Breakdown

• after:2024/01/01Keeps the messages received after January 1, 2024. after: before:
• before:2024/04/01Keeps those received before April 1, 2024. after: before:

Variants

• from:amy@example.com after:2024/01/01 before:2024/04/01Open in Gmail ↗

  The same period, for a single sender.

• subject:invoice after:2024/01/01Open in Gmail ↗

  Messages whose subject contains "invoice" since January 1, 2024.

Pitfalls

• The documented formats are YYYY/MM/DD and MM/DD/YYYY. Day-first dates (DD/MM/YYYY), the norm in much of the world, are not among them: 04/05/2024 is read as April 5. This example uses YYYY/MM/DD, which is unambiguous.Documented by Google · Gmail Help: search operators
• For the Gmail API, Google states that dates are interpreted as midnight in the PST time zone. The web help page says nothing about the time zone.Documented by Google · Gmail API: filtering and queries

See also

• Find invoicessubject:invoice has:attachment
• Find emails with an attachment older than 6 monthshas:attachment older_than:6m