total mail search

[dale77n]

hi all....here's my problem: i have thousands of emails in my gmail. some time ago a friend told me about another friend i knew in high school and i am fuzzy about what was mentioned. i sure don't want to read all my emails one by one, so i was hoping to find a program that would go through my mail searching for the name of my friend...it would be in the body of the letter, and not the heading... i don't even know how to word a web search for this!! is there such a beast? can anyone help me? thanks!!

 

[cwwozniak]

Hi dale77n, and welcome to TSG.

Are you using the web browser interface to gmail or some mail program?

The web interface should have a "Search Mail" box and button near the top when you are looking at your different mail folders.

 

[dale77n]

that search just finds the subject or heading....here's what i need : someone wrote to me about a guy i use to know. i forget if they said he was dead or alive. i don't remember who wrote. i want to enter my friend's name in a search and have it go through each email one-by-one until it finds that name. is there such a tool?

 

[dale77n]

ok...i went to search mail and put in our mutual contacts and got a short list of mail which was doable to search by eye....found what i wanted! but still...is there such a search tool as i was asking about?
thanks for your help!!

 

[cwwozniak]

that search just finds the subject or heading....here's what i need : someone wrote to me about a guy i use to know. i forget if they said he was dead or alive. i don't remember who wrote. i want to enter my friend's name in a search and have it go through each email one-by-one until it finds that name. is there such a tool?

I just tried the "Search mail" function on the Inbox for my Gmail account. I entered the name of a person I knew had been mentioned in previous e-mails but none of them would have been sent from or to that person. The results were messages where the name was only in the body and not in the subject, from, to, or cc fields

Gmail does support some advanced search filtering capabilities that may let you further narrow the search results to find one specific message.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190

I have no idea if there is any kind of third party software or browser plug-in that would allow you to get better targeted results than what is provided by Gmail.