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Specify Gmail Search Criteria for Downloading Emails

The first step in the workflow is to specify the search criteria for the emails you wish to download from Gmail. You can utilize any of the search operators that are native to Gmail, enabling you to narrow down your search and locate specific emails. The Save Emails add-on also offers a simplified interface that can be used to visually build the search criteria.

Search Emails in Gmail

All emails that match the specified criteria will be saved to your Google Drive.

  1. From - You can search for emails sent by a particular sender(s)

  2. Subject - You may search for emails containing specific words in the subject line

  3. Advanced Options - These options contain a list of advanced search factors based on which you can download your emails. You can filter emails by message size, Gmail category (promotions, social, primary), whether the mail is read, unread or starred mails and many more.

  4. Gmail Label - You have a list of all your Gmail labels (or folders) in the dropdown. You can select any label from the dropdown, or choose ‘Mail & Spam & Trash’ to download emails from anywhere in Gmail (including spam and trash folders).

  5. After and Before Date - You may search for emails received before or after particular dates by specifying the date in yyyy/mm/dd format in these fields. For instance, you can specify 2022/01/01in theafterfield and2022/12/31in thebefore field to download all mails received in the calendar year 2022.

For this guide, we will be downloading all emails received in the last 6 months from various online vendors like Amazon, Uber, InstaCart and DoorDash, containing details of the orders placed. So, in the ‘From’ field, all the vendors have been mentioned, separated by a comma. In the Subject field, we’ll enter the word ‘order’ so that all the emails sent by these companies which contain the word ‘order’ are searched.

Since we want emails received in the last 6 months to be saved, we will select ‘newer_than:4m’ from the list of advanced options, and edit the option to be ‘newer_than:6m’. For the Gmail Label, let’s go ahead with Inbox.

Once you have specified all the required search criteria, a search query will appear at the bottom that links to emails in your Gmail inbox matching your search query. This is a good way to test if we have correctly constructed the search query.

Note: We need not mention any Before or After dates for this search query as we have already specified the time period in the Advanced options.