Opened up Gmail this morning only to find one small feature been quietly slipped down into it – The auto-complete list that pops up on email search. I frequently use email search and haven’t seen this feature before. So I am guessing it must have been there for not more than a couple of days.

Apart from the ‘expected’ listing of contacts and labels as you type, it even shows useful search criteria and operators which are relatively unknown to many users.

Some of the useful operators / search criteria that you can use:

» is – Use ‘is: read’, ‘is: unread’ or ‘is: starred’ to search for read, unread and starred messages respectively.

» has – Use this operator to find attachments, photos, videos, documents, calendar events, etc. For eg. ‘has: photos’ will display all emails that has photos in it.

» before, after – Use ‘before: yyyy/mm/dd’ and ‘after: yyyy/mm/dd’ to search emails received/sent before and after the specified date respectively. For eg. ‘before 2010/01/01’ will enlist all emails received/sent before 1st January 2010.

For the complete list of operators, click here.