Help easily locate your Gmail message

If the recipient of a Gmail message is lost in a flood of emails and can not find your own message, you can help him find it easily with a simple gesture.

Obviously the recipient can get in Gmail messages and search based on who is the sender, by setting the search term FROM or a few words from the subject with the term SUBJECT to display a list of messages that meet the search terms. But would not it be useful if there was a way to find out directly the one message that interests him?

There is an alternative search trick with which the sender can really help the recipient to find a specific email that has sent him in the past.

When you send an email via Gmail, a unique message ID is added to the message header according to RFC 822 specification. To view your message ID, open the email in Gmail, go to the menu click on the 3 dots on the top right and from there select "Show Original". A new tab will open in your browser. The unique Message ID will appear in the first line of the header as in the photo below. In this case the Message-ID is:

[email protected]le.com

The message-ID of a particular e-mail is exactly the same for the sender and recipient. This means that if the recipient opens the header of the e-mail message in his mailbox, the Message-ID will match that of the same message from the sender's folder.

In addition, Gmail offers a lesser-known search term - Rfc822msgid - which helps you search for Message-based emails.

Therefore, if your message ID is [email protected] , a simple search for Rfc8222msgid:[email protected] will return the exact email to your search results. Note that the search term Rfc8222msgid is written in uppercase R and not lowercase, as mentioned in related help from Google, since with a small r it does not work for us.

And that's the trick. This search query will work for both the recipient and the sender of the email.

Therefore, if you pass the message identifier to the recipient, it can simply use the term Rfc822msgid to locate that email in its own mailbox. Or just send it complete the search term. In this case, all the search term is:

Rfc822msgid:[email protected]le.com

Since the Message-ID is too complex, and perhaps your recipient does not understand what you are saying, you can simply search your Gmail, copy the Gmail search page URL, and transfer them to the recipient, simply asking him to run it. The URL will work for them, as the message ID is the same for them. In this case our address is:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/Rfc822msgid%3Aa2025cb18b12403a10ec0bb2f2adca70cbd8e776-10030322-100159012%40google.com