Search Through Your Gmail Offline With Google Desktop Search
I love Gmail so much I’ve pretty much treated it as a repository of my information.
So all of my work and business related messages are forwarded to my Gmail regardless of email address (see here how to make Gmail your universal inbox). Whenever I need to store important information like passwords, account numbers and the like, I send them to myself through Gmail and add a + modifier to the address so it automatically gets assigned that label. After all I’m mostly online, and if I need to look for something I just search Gmail via my browser.
However, there are times that I need to look for information when I’m offline, such as when I have my laptop but there’s no working WiFi connection. Here’s where Google Desktop search comes in. And it does a very good job at searching through Gmail messages on your local machine. Assuming your computer is already 100% indexed, and indexing is ongoing, you can search offline within your Gmail messages, and you can view the actual messages even without having to get online.
For instance, I pres Ctrl-Ctrl to fire up Google Desktop search to look for a certain keyword, “login”. I then get these results.
I find the message I want to read, and I click on that result. I get the entire email text.
It’s quite simple and easy. Sometimes I search for people’s mobile numbers that I know they’ve indicated on their signatures. I just use the keywords “(person’s name) mobile” and so forth.
The Google Desktop search interface only looks into the more recently-received messages and recently-saved files. But you can still search across hundreds or even thousands of cached emails by opening the Search More dropdown box and clicking Search Desktop.
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yeah I love & use Gmail for that very same reason – being able to Search + Find stuff!!
i think i tried Google Desktop Search but i thought it was slowing my puter down???
of course i hardly had any RAM on my old notebook – & now that i’ve got 2 GIG maybe that won’t slow things*
Aren’t you at all concerned about storing account numbers and passwords in a free public online service?
re: Dave M
A company with dedicated security staff will almost always do better than an individual. It’s safer than one’s (theft-prone) wallet, and certainly safer than one’s (worm and theft-prone) laptop hard drive.
I hope Google Desktop gets ported to Linux.
That is a good idea. I’ve used Gmail exclusively ever since Outlook locked up and locked me out. As far as the desktop feature goes, it does seem to slow my computer down somewhat as well. Oh, well, at least it has helped me find some of my files faster!
Whenever I use Desktop Search to find Gmail messages, once I click on them, my browser opens and I get the “can’t display this webpage” message, because I’m not connected.