firdouss.com

I used to use a Firefox addon called ‘Better GMail’ or some Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox to enhance GMail’s functionality. One of the most important feature for me is the ability to quickly see (at a glance) which email have which attachments. If I’m looking for an e-mail with a string of photos attached to it, I would want to see some kind of icon/indicator that this email contains image attachment (not just a mere paperclip icon next to it).

The problem is that, I would have to reinstall the Better GMail addon or Greasemonkey script in every browser that I wanted to use. This can be quite a hassle, especially when you need to find it fast. GMail have a built-in search function that you can use to this advantage:

Yes, the keyword you can use is filename:. For example, if you’re looking for a file that starts with “Flyers”, you can search it with the keyword:

filename: flyers

… and it will match any emails that contains attachments that have the word ‘flyers‘ in the filename. You can also search by using extensions:

filename: .mp3

… and it will search for all emails that have attachments that contains the keyword ‘.mp3‘ in it.

Let’s take one step further than just using a search. Why don’t create a filter to automatically apply a label to an email with specific attachments (or a group of attachment kinds). You can do this by putting the search keywords in the ‘Has the words:‘ section when you’re creating a new filter:

Then proceed to assign a label to it:

You can group attachments together by using the OR keyword, like follows:

filename: jpg OR filename: png OR filename: gif OR filename: jpeg

This will match any of the filenames listed and perform the action on the filter (i.e. add labels).

I’ve created filters for some of the common filetypes that I always receive in my email everyday, and thus my GMail sidebar looks like this now:

With this, I have my one-click-find-emails-by-attachment-kind function on my GMail everywhere I go, without needing any browser extensions or extra applications!

posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 13:43 in Guides.