Gmail Announces Faster and Easier Search for Enhanced User Efficiency
November 15, 2012
By Tabitha Naylor, Contributing Writer
Earlier this week, Gmail announced that in order to make searching for messages “faster and easier”, it has unveiled new ways. According to a blog post written by Gmail software engineer Christian Kurmann, Google‘s email client now lets users search by size, by exact match, with more flexible date options and more.
For instance, to find emails larger than 5MB, type in“size: 5m” or “larger: 5m” in the search bar, while searching for “older_than: 1y” produces emails sent over a year ago.
Kurmann added that with other recent improvements to Gmail, including a feature that shows instant results when you search and improved auto complete predictions, these changes “go hand in hand”.
Last month, in order to make it easier for users to reference other emails without having to close a draft, Gmail started testing a new compose-and-reply format. It also began testing the option to view profile pictures of contacts, so users can find who they want to email, faster.
Provided by Google (News - Alert), Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service. For free storage, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard from the two to four MB, exactly what its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. However, it started with an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user.
Larger than many other mail services support, it’s individual Gmail messages which include attachments may be up to 25 MB. With over 425 million active users worldwide, as of June 2012, it was declared to be the most widely used web-based email provider.
During an interview with Google, the idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth and several years before it was announced to the public, it went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. On April 1, 2004, Google announced Gmail to the public and on October 24, 2007, IMAP support was added to it.
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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli