Gmail Search to inform you about matches in spam

Google is rolling out a feature currently to Gmail on the web that changes how search works on the service. To sum it up, search takes into account matches found in spam on Gmail which it did not before.

Previously, search only took into account all regular folders such as inbox or user defined folders as well as the trash when you ran a search on Gmail.

While that was helpful most of the time, it meant that you had to check the spam folder manually each time if you were looking for an email that you could not locate.

Say, you wanted to investigate why a certain newsletter would not arrive anymore. Running a search on Gmail was not enough to locate these emails, as you had to search the spam folder as well to make sure it was not sorted automatically into a folder or flagged as spam on the site instead.

The improved search option takes care of that as search runs across all folders on Gmail now including spam.

Gmail does not display emails in spam or trash that match the search query right away though and the main reason why that is the case is that it would not make much sense to mix trash, spam and regular emails in a single listing.

The service displays a message at the bottom of the search results instead if emails were found in spam or trash.

The message reads "Some messages in Trash or  Spam match your search. View messages. View messages is a link which you can click on to view those messages.

The feature is rolled out in the coming two weeks to all users of the service who use the web version of Gmail.

Google will roll out another feature related to search at the same time. If a search query is to general to be of much use, e.g. if a user searches for a term that would return lots of results, then they may see a message alerting them to the fact: "Improve result with search options such as sender, data, size and more".

 

 

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