Searching and Filtering
Clean Email allows you to search for groups in any Smart Folder, search for senders/mailing lists in the Unsubscriber, and search for rules in Auto Clean. You can also filter the list of message groups to help you narrow things down and find the messages you are looking for.
Searching in Clean Email
To search for message groups in Clean Email, click the search bar at the top of the main view and enter the word or phrase you want to search for.
📌 Note: If you enter more than one word in the search bar, Clean Email searches for results containing any of the individual words.
Enter at least two characters of the search term or phrase, and Clean Email immediately begins filtering the list of groups displayed.
📌 Note: Clean Email only searches the sender and subject fields of your messages. For your privacy, message bodies are not downloaded, so Clean Email cannot search message contents.
Filtering Message Groups
Every folder listed in the left-hand navigation pane is considered a Smart Folder, and automatically includes certain filters by default. For example, the Inbox folder only shows groups of messages that are in your inbox. Likewise, some other Smart Folders automatically apply the “In inbox” filter by default, for your convenience. As another example, the Top Senders folder is limited to groups of messages from the senders who have sent you the most messages. All Smart Folders exclude messages marked as spam. For more information about Smart Folders, please see our Smart Folders article.
You can apply additional filters on top of each Smart Folder’s default filters to further narrow the list of message groups displayed. You can even do this after using the search bar, to filter the search results.
For example, you could perform a search for “Google” and then filter the search results to include only messages that are older than two years.
Clean Email provides several frequently used filter options for quick access just above the search bar.
- Unread: This button lets you control whether or not message groups are displayed based on their read or unread status.
- Choose Unread to display messages that are marked as unread.
- Choose Read to display only messages that have been marked as read.
- Choose Any or click the X to clear the filter.
- Old Mail: This button lets you filter message groups based on the age of the most recent message in the group. When you click this button, the filter is set to display only message groups older than 6 months. You can click the button again to choose the desired time frame. To clear the filter, click X.
- Large Mail: Use this button to filter message groups based on size. When you click this button, the filter is set to display only groups larger than 1 MB by default. You can click the button again to choose the desired message group size. To clear the filter, click X.
To apply custom filters, click the Filter button to the right of the Large Mail filter button.
In the drop-down menu, you can apply various filters to help you find the messages you are looking for. To clear any filter, click the X in the updated filter button above the search bar.
📌 Note: Some filters are not applicable to certain Smart Folders. For example, when viewing the Inbox folder, the label filters are not applicable. Depending on what you are currently viewing, some of the filtering options described below may not be available.
- Click the Star drop-down to control whether the list includes only messages that do not have a star/flag, only messages that are starred/flagged, or all messages regardless of whether or not they are starred/flagged.
- Click the Sent by drop-down to filter the list to include only messages sent by People, Automated Systems, or Mailing Lists.
- If you use Gmail or Google Workspace (GSuite), messages can have more than one label each. You can label a message without moving it out of your inbox, but if you move a message to a label, the message automatically receives the label as well.
For all other types of email, there are no labels, but you can move each message to a single specific folder.
In Clean Email, the Labeled As and Not Labeled fields refer to labels in Gmail, or to messages stored in specific folders for all other types of email accounts.
To filter the list to include only messages that have one or more specific labels or are stored in specific folders, click the Labeled As drop-down.
You can scroll down and find the specific label or folder you are looking for, or begin typing the name of the label or folder you want, to narrow the list in the drop-down, and then select a label or folder. Repeat this process to filter for more than one label or folder at the same time.
- Conversely, if you want to narrow the list to exclude certain labels or folders, click the Not Labeled drop-down and search or select the labels or folders whose messages you do not want to see in the list.
- Click the Status drop-down if you want to control whether the list includes only messages marked as read, only messages marked as unread, or all messages regardless of reading status.
- Click the Older than… drop-down to filter the list of messages to include only messages that were sent prior to a certain elapsed time. For example, you can select “2 weeks” to include only messages that you received more than two weeks ago.
- Click the Larger than drop-down to filter the list to include only messages that take up a certain amount of storage space. In the drop-down list, select the largest message size you want included.
For information about message grouping, please see Smart Folders.
Please contact us and we will be happy to help.
