Filtering the Inflow - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 230

As you can see, the form is pretty straightforward. You can search by the To
and From headers, by subject, and by what words are and aren't in the mes-
sage. You can also search by date and whether or not the message has attach-
ments. he drop-down menu lets you limit your message to a particular part
of your e-mail, including labeled e-mail! his is just one more reason to make
sure to organize your messages; it makes them much easier to search.

Let's consider a searching strategy for your messages. Because you're most
likely going to be searching titles and snippets that have been e-mailed to
you from alert services, you want to take a more general approach to the
search than you would with a full-text search engine. However, you should
take advantage of the special syntax whenever you can to help narrow your
search. Are you sure it was a Google alert? Include Google in the subject. Are
you sure that it had the word “green” in it? Search for the word green . Use
as many of the small clues as you can remember, and then remove them one
by one, because your memory may not be exact.

If you're used to using client-side e-mail programs such as Eudora or Out-
look, GMail will take a little getting used to at irst. But if you move around
a lot and access your e-mail from several diferent computers, I think you'll
appreciate the ability to access GMail from pretty much everywhere. he
ilters and spam iltering are very useful, too.

GMail has attracted a lot of interest in the online community, both for its
ailiation with Google and for its large storage capacities. Many develop-
ers have made their own useful tools and gizmos to use in association with
GMail. Some of these you might ind useful; let's take a look.

A GMail Toolbox

Lots of outits have come up with various GMail tools to help extend or
change the GMail experience. Some of these tools are ofered by Google,
but most of them are not. he following are just a few of the tools you can
add to your GMail experience, and a couple of Web sites that will keep you
up to date on new ones:

GMail Notiier (toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/). his tool sits in your
system tray and pops up a little notiier whenever you get an e-mail. Cre-
ated by Google, GMail Notiier must be downloaded. It requires either
Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X 10.3.8 or later (including Tiger).

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