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Search For Conversation Starters In Gmail

By Lifehacker US Edition on November 6, 2008 at 8:37 AM

By not permitting results with appended prefixes like Re: and Fwd:, you can quickly find the beginnings of an email thread in Gmail. Simply type -subject:Re: -subject:Fwd: to only reveal conversation starters, and optionally add from:[email address] (where [email address] is an actual email address) to find an email from a particular sender. Too lazy to type all that out? Go to Settings > Labs, enable Quick Links, and scroll down to click the Save Changes button. Now search on -subject:Re: -subject:Fwd: and click Add Quick Link in the Quick Link pane on the left. Give your search link a better name (I went with the highly technical-sounding “Thread Intro Search”) and click OK. Now with one click, search results with only initial messages will appear, and you can further refine results by adding terms and qualifiers to the string already in the search box.

Gmail tip: searching by the first post in a conversation [Rakesh Agrawal's Blog via Google Blogoscoped]

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