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There are plenty of reasons to love Gmail: completely free features, plenty of storage space, free POP3 access to your email as well as free offline access to your email messages via the IMAP route, and many other awesome great options.

As the search geek, there’s one thing I really appreciate: the ability to use very flexible (advanced) search features to go through thousands of email messages stored for years in one place. I am not geeky (and probably organized) enough to synchronize my email efficiently when moving from computer to computer or to make and update my backup, and (I realize that might be my mistake) I have been used to relying on Gmail for years.

This post looks at one of Gmail life-saving features: the option to store and search through tons of email with attachments for you to be able to:

Quickly and efficiently find email attachments (even if you can hardly remember the file name, the sender name, the date when you received the email, etc).

Free up some space (yes, storage space is huge but not unlimited. In case you have ever sent or received high resolution photographs, videos or large database files, you may want to delete them to save on space).

Search For Email With Attachments

There are several ways to search for attachments in Gmail using Gmail advanced search operators:

has:attachment – This one filters emails to only those that have anything attached.

has:attachment doc – This one filters emails to only those that have .doc files attached. 

filename:.doc – Works almost exactly as the above one (but this one is the documented operator for searching attachment types).

Note: filename: already implies that there should be an attachment included, so you don’t need to use has:attachment together with it.

Note: a dot is not required before the file extension: filename:.doc = filename:doc

filename:google*.doc – This one filters emails to only those that have doc files attached and these files have [google] in the beginning of the name (whereas filename:*google*.doc searches for messages that have documents attached with "google” mentioned somewhere in the middle of the file name).

filename:.doc OR filename:.html – This one filters emails to only those that have either .doc or .html files attached (or both).

filename:.doc AND filename:.html – - This one filters emails to only those that have both .doc or .html files attached.