Enhance your iPhone mail searches with these handy tips!

If you have a never ending email inbox, it can be very difficult to find an email in a search. Luckily we have 4 handy parameters that will allow you to narrow your search and limit the number of results you return.

Spotlight understands sender vs. recipient, dates, and if a message has been read or flagged, so you can use these parameters to get targeted search results. It gives four examples:

Flagged January 2012
Searches for all flagged messages from January 2012, as well as for messages containing these words.

Unread last week from:@icloud.com
Searches all unread messages from last week where the sender’s e-mail ends with @icloud.com, as well as messages containing these words.

Vip read yesterday
Searches all read messages from contacts marked as VIPs, as well as messages containing these words

to:John Tuesday
Searches all messages sent on Monday to a contact named “John,” or an e-mail address starting with John, as well as messages containing these words.

Each of these tips helped narrow the number of search results, but also the results often included many e-mails because they contained one or more of my search terms. Still, e-mails within the search parameters are listed at the top of the results, with e-mails only containing a word or two of your search terms listed below.