Until now, the search bar in the user interface did not support query terms to search on metadata.

I’m glad to say that commits 2ddddaae and a1cbe72a add support for filtering by date and message status right from the search bar, introducing five operators:

  • “date:” must be followed by an iso-8601 date (format YYYY-MM-DD), or by a specific month (format YYYY-MM), or just a year (YYYY). It selects the messages from respectively that day,or month, or year.

  • “before:” has the same format but selects messages dated from this day/month/year or an earlier date.

  • “after:” is of course the opposite, selecting messages past the date that follows.

  • “is:” must be followed by a status among read,replied,forward,archived,sent. Criteria can be combined by using the option several times, as statuses are cumulative, not mutually exclusive,

  • “isnot:” is of course the opposite of “is”. It accepts the same arguments and filters out the messages that have the corresponding status bit.

    “is:” and “isnot:” can also be combined, for instance: “is:archived isnot:sent”.

A few more search bar operators are likely to be added to that list, as it’s a pretty handy and fast way to express basic queries.