Get slick with Ctrl-click and other ways to sharpen searches

Greetings from Yahoo! HQ. Josh here.

Since I’m on the Yahoo! Mail team, I’ve been using the Beta for quite some time. And when I say I use it, I mean I use it for ALL my mail (and believe me, it’s a bunch). One of my favorite “hidden” features happens to be a search shortcut. Did you know that you can Ctrl-click on the Subject line in the message header to automatically trigger a mail search for all the pieces of mail with that subject? For all you new folks, the message header I’m referring to is that purple-colored area at the top of each message when you open it. Go ahead, open a message, hold down the Ctrl button and click on the Subject line in that purple section… I know you want to try it.

That’s my favorite. But there are others, too. Like to find messages from Gwen, all I have to do is just type “From:gwen” (no spaces) in the search window. To find messages with “Thursday” in the subject, I type “Subject:thursday”. And how about this: to find messages about pretzels, which do not contain the word “twist,” I type “pretzel -twist”. That’s (pretzel)(space)(hyphen)(twist). The minus sign (the hyphen) is a handy way to exclude items from a search. Type what you’re looking for, then a space, then a hyphen before the term you want to exclude, with no space in between.

I’m actually delighted with how well this search tool works, since it gives me great ways to maneuver around in my very busy Mail account.

Happy searching,

Josh