Tip of the week # 528
23 November 2017


Find email messages sent or received between certain dates (Microsoft Outlook) *

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a tip about how to find email messages sent or received between certain dates. What I wrote still stands but I found a much easier way. (Thanks for the inspiration, Jackie!)

Here's how:

  1. Open the Outlook folder you want to search (If you don't know where you have stored the message, you can skip this step and use step 4.)
  2. Click in the Instant Search box in the top right hand corner or press CTRL + E
  3. Type received: <start date> .. <end date>
  4. If necessary, click on Try searching again in All mail Items at the bottom of the search results to search all other Outlook folders

For example, received:01/07 .. 31/07 will find any email messages that you sent or received in July this year. (No need to specify the current year.) Or received:01/01/2015 .. 01/05/2015 will find emails you sent or received between January and May 2015. I obviously hope you had a good reason for hanging on to stuff from 2015, especially because various survey statistics show that we waste too much time searching for documents and email messages. To be precise, according to a McKinsey report people spend on average about 9 hours per week searching and gathering information! So only keep what you need - and know how to find it.

Related tips:

  1. Find that needle in a haystack: tip_292.php
  2. Find even more needles in that haystack: tip_294.php
  3. Reduce irrelevant search results: tip_376.php
  4. Search for messages sent to a particular person during a certain period of time: tip_406.php
  5. Find email messages sent or received between certain dates: tip_524.php

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* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.