Searching Your Email Messages

• Search for exact phrases—To look for a specific phrase consisting of two or more words, enclose the phrase in quotes when you enter it in the search box. For example, the string:

  "birthday party"

  produces only search results that include that exact phrase. Messages with just "birthday" or just "party" are ignored (as are messages with "birthday parties" or "party birthday").

• Eliminate specific strings from the results—To have Yahoo! Mail ignore messages that contain irrelevant strings, entire the string to be ignored preceded by a hyphen into the search box. For example:

  birthday -jack

  finds all messages that include the string "birthday" but not the string "jack". (In other words, messages with both "birthday" and "jack" or any string containing "jack" are ignored.)

• Search by subject—Yahoo! Mail normally searches all parts of the email messages, including all senders, recipients, subjects, message bodies, attachment names, and most attachment contents. To limit the search to just the subject of messages, include the modifier subject: in front of the search string (with no space in between). For example:

  subject:birthday

  finds only messages with "birthday" as part of the subject. Messages with "birthday" anywhere else, such as in the message body, are ignored.

• Search by sender—To limit the search to just the senders of messages, include the modifier from: in front of the search string. For, example:

  from:jack

  finds only messages with "jack" (or strings including "jack", such as "jackie") as part of the sender information. Messages with "jack" anywhere else, such as in the subject or message body, are ignored.

• Search by attachment type—To limit the search the messages that include a particular type of attachment, include the modifier attachmenttype: in front of the search string. For example:

  attachmenttype:jpeg

  finds all messages with JPEG or JPG attachments.

Search modifiers can be a great tool. You can even combine multiple modifiers in single search. For example:

subject:"birthday party" -from:jack

tells Yahoo! Mail to search just for messages with the exact phrase "birthday party" in the subject from someone other than "jack". That’s pretty specific!

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Performing an Advanced Search

Take Me to Yahoo! Mail

What’s Next

When you use modifiers to limit your search, you can also further refine the results as described in Refining Your Search Results. Some modifiers that you enter, such as sender or attachment type, also show up as search criteria.

For more details and examples, see the Yahoo! Mail Help article on search modifiers.