Find Your Oldest Messages in Gmail

At some point in the past, Google removed the Oldest » link out of everything except for your inbox and labels. This makes it hard to find the “first” or an early email of any sort if you have a lot in your search result. I wanted to find an email of which I had a lot of, to see what was the first one, of 10000s. Fortunately there is a workaround for this!

1. Perform your search.

To search all archived messages and not just the inbox, do a blank search.

2. At the top of the url, add /p9999 or other sufficiently large number to go beyond the last result.

Gmail will show you an error and not display any messages.

3. Click “Refresh” – you will end up at the last page of the search result.

If anyone has an idea how to do this in an easier, less complicated way, please let me know in comments! I would hope that Google will add a sorting function to Gmail, bringing the oldest message at top, but I guess there is not a lot of demand for that.

Tip from Google Help forum.

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2 Trackbacks

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  1. By Dave Drager on October 29, 2009 at 9:09 pm

    New blog post: Find Your Oldest Messages in Gmail http://sysbash.com/4l

  2. By GeekLad on October 30, 2009 at 1:13 am

    Find Your Oldest Messages in Gmail http://ff.im/-aIzfg

3 Comments

  1. tomv

    didn’t work for me. message:”No messages matched your search. You can broaden your search to look in “Mail & Spam & Trash”.”

    where /p2 nicely brought me to the second page. am i doing something wrong?

    Posted October 29, 2009 at 11:16 pm | Permalink
  2. After seeing the message “No messages matched your search.” – Click “Refresh” – the link that appears above in the same line as Archive, Mark as Read, etc.

    Posted October 29, 2009 at 11:26 pm | Permalink
  3. tomv

    so cool! thx!

    Posted October 30, 2009 at 12:44 am | Permalink

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