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!
Updated 4/11/2010!
There is a simple URL you can visit to get to the last page of all of your messages. This will show you the first message you ever got in Gmail, and when you signed up for Gmail. Simply visit:
https://mail.google.com/mail/#search//p99999
This will return an error, then send you to the last page of all of your messages, inbox and archived.
Thanks to commenter Josh for this tip!
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.
Tagged: gmail, search, tips, tricks

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4 Comments
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?
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.
so cool! thx!
This didn’t work for me at first. I tried hitting gmail’s refresh button, my browser’s refresh button. After playing with it for a few… I found that by putting 2 “/”s it worked!! Just copy and paste this link in your browser!!
https://mail.google.com/mail/#search//p99999