Here’s a productivity tip for Microsoft Outlook users who would be familiar with its search feature.
Quite often, most people are only looking for specific emails they’ve received from someone, sent to someone or containing some keyword on the subject line. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn’t seem to recognize this and, by default, searches for all emails in which the given text – let’s call it ‘keyword’ – is present – in the TO, FROM or SUBJECT fields of the email. As a result, most searches take a long time and return long lists that are fairly useless in most contexts.
It’s only recently that I learned that it’s possible to use certain shortcuts in the search box to speed up the search and make the results more relevant. Such shortcuts take the form of from:keyword, to:keyword, subject:keyword, body:keyword, etc. For example, all emails in the Inbox from email addresses that contain the keyword webinar:
When these shortcuts are used, Outlook serves far fewer and more relevant results much faster. Shortcuts even work faster than sorting emails by TO, FROM or the other fields.
Thank you Microsoft for such Outlook search shortcuts.
While on this subject, let make a general observation about Outlook: From our recent experience, users of Outlook seem to be a dwindling tribe, with an increasing number of people using webmail addresses even for business emails. For instance, 54% of over 100 website owners who have signed up for our EMAIL360 website lead generation widget have done so with their Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail accounts. This is despite the fact that each one of them owns a website and could whip up email addresses on their website’s domain names (e.g. me@mywebsite.com) in a jiffy. It could be argued that they might still be using Outlook as their desktop client, but from the plain text formats of the emails we receive from them, we find that hard to believe.
Nevertheless, having found this shortcut, we wanted to share it with the world of Outlook users, however small their population is becoming. Consider it done.