Find an email address within the body of an email

Question

I know I can put in an email address in the search box in Gmail to find the messages sent either to or from that email address. However, I have a situation where someone was supposed to send me details about an email address in the body of the email.

I have one message that I know contains the email address in question within the body content, and I'm trying to see if I received others, but when I put that address in the search box, nothing returns. I have tried specifying body: in the search, as well as enclosing the email address in quotes, but it never shows up.

Is there any way to search for addresses that are not part of any to/from fields? Anything special I have to do to escape the @ sign, or something like that?

Answer 1

The only way I know of doing this is to limit your search to filter out cases in which you don't want to see that email address. This should at least remove a lot (not all) of false positives from your search results.

-to:[email protected] -from:[email protected] -cc:[email protected] "[email protected]"

What you're doing is filtering out [email protected] from the to, from and cc fields. What should be left is searching for "[email protected]" in any remaining fields.

Again this isn't 100% reliable, but might help you out.