Mastering Gmail Search

When Gmail debuted 12 years ago it made a shift in how we thought about email. At a time when the norm was Hotmail's 2MB free storage, or using an ISP email address you were likely to lose at some point, the days of having to tightly manage your email storage are long gone.
Instead of deleting, the idea of archiving messages indefinitely became plausible. This has been helped by a clean interface to keep a tidy inbox and powerful search capabilities, so you can find and retrieve old emails at will. Gmail search is also speedy which makes it practical, even if you don't keep your inbox at all organized.
For sake of brevity, I'll cover a few of my favorite and most useful Gmail search operators and then give you the full list below with some examples.

First Things First

If you don't want to remember any operators, clicking on the search box down arrow will bring up a dialog with useful ways to search, covering typical queries using labels, date, recipients, and so on.
On the opposite of the spectrum, those who love keyboard shortcuts will certainly want to enter operators by hand. So make sure you have Gmail keyboard shortcuts turned on (Shift + ' / ' shows the full list) and simply hitting ' / ' (forward slash) will bring focus on the search box.
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