Outlook - Find e-mails by date received or sent

Every January I tidy up my Outlook inbox. I move the e-mails from the previous year into a folder (it makes it easier to archive later). To do this I need to select a range of e-mails by date. In this article I'll explain how use Outlook's advanced find to do this. I'm using Outlook 2013 but other versions should be similar.


Scenario 1
It is January 2018. I would like to find all e-mails received and sent during 2017. I currently have no e-mails in my inbox from years prior to 2017.

1. With the Outlook inbox (Mail) on the screen press Ctrl-Shift-F and the Advanced Find window will appear.
2. Click Browse and select the Inbox and Sent Items
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Under 'Define more criteria' click Field | Date/Time Fields | Received
5. Condition = on or before
6. Value = 31/12/2017
7. Click Add to List
8. Under 'Define more criteria' click Field | Date/Time Fields | Sent
9. Condition = on or before
10. Value = 31/12/2017
11. Click Add to List
12. Click Find Now

In the above screen shot you can see the list of e-mails (received and sent) for 2017 are shown. At this point I could select those (use Shift-click or Ctrl-A to select them all) and drag them to a folder in my inbox.


Scenario 2
Perhaps you'd like to be more specific and select between a date range? It's very similar to the above but use the Condition 'between' and enter the Value as <start date> and <end date>. Here's an example:

The above will show all the e-mails from 1st January 2017 to 31st December 2017. It doesn't show those from 1st January 2018.

NOTE: Excel uses the date format you have set on your computer. In my examples I'm using dd/mm/yyyy but for those of you in the US you would use mm/dd/yyyy.


Conclusion
The Advanced Find is very powerful and can save you some time. You can do it manually instead of course, it's easy enough to select e-mails by their date from your inbox directly - but it's rather slow and cumbersome, using the Advanced Find it's much faster and more accurate. I hope this has been helpful, feel free to add comments in below if you have some similar tips to share.

Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

For Gmail users there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts that can be very useful.

To see a list of shortcuts, press Shift-/ (shift and the forward slash together).

With the Shift-/ window on the screen, at the top, click Enable.

Now when in the Gmail main view you can click C to compose a message or when you are reading a message you can press R to reply or Shift-R to reply in a new window (useful on a small screen), for example. For a full list of shortcuts and an explanation, see the following page:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&ctx=mail&answer=6594

Trace the source of an e-mail

Gmail 'Show original' (15/11/12)

Have you ever received an e-mail and wondered if you could check where it really came from? You can find out using the header information from any e-mail you receive.

Most e-mail software have a way to show the header information, for example:

• In Gmail you can click the Show original option - see the example opposite.
• In Outlook 2013, with the e-mail open click File | Properties.

Once you have the header text, copy it (select it and press Ctrl-C). 

You can paste the header text into an e-mail tracing website - it will analyse the information for you. For example:

http://www.iptrackeronline.com/email-header-analysis.php

(last accessed 16/04/2014)

Websites such as the one above can show you where in the world the e-mail was sent from - interesting!

However, a word of warning, sophisticated spam e-mails may be able to fake the header text. Another problem is that the header may only show the ISP (Internet Service Provider) of the e-mail. This of course maybe enough for you, just to know which country the e-mail came from of course. The most important thing to remember is that these websites (like the one above) can give you an indication or confirmation of the source of an e-mail but don't rely on the information 100%.



Updated 16th April 2014