Searching your Hotmail inbox

I didn’t realise until recently that you could search your hotmail inbox using keywords to narrow the search. I’m talking about the web version of Hotmail, not when you’re accessing it via a client application like Outlook.

For example, let’s say you wanted to find an email from your friend John Lyons, that will have been filed in a folder called “School”. Just type “from:Lyons folder:School” in the search box at the top right of your hotmail webpage:

It works with “to” as well, and of course you can search all folders by omitting the “folder” keyword.

[Update: "Subject" works too, so for example looking for emails with a subject containing the word "tickets", you would enter "subject:tickets"]

With my inbox having well over 10,000 messages, and multiple folders, this kind of search refinement is really useful to me.  It’s really quick too.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2011
  when i typed "folder:inbox" it did'nt work. how can i search in inbox? thanks..

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2011
  What a revelation! Thanks, Ian.

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2012
  Hmmm - Great if you can remember the first word in the Subject title but I'm not sure Hotmail will search in the middle . . . by contrast Yahoo seemed to do this contrary to what their site says it will do

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2012
  Thanks Ian - I eventually deduced this with a bit of trial and error. I've separately sent a comment to Microsoft along the lines that I seemed to find that the search string needed at least 2 characters. If you agree with me on this, it'll confirm to me that I wasn't having a fat day!

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2012
  Seems to work ok with 1 character for me. Not sure about that fat day. Mind you, I think most of my days are fat days so we're even ;-)

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2013
  my search is not working today. anyone else?