If the recipient of a Gmail message is lost in a deluge of emails and can't locate your message, you can help them find it easily with a simple trick.
Obviously, the recipient can also go into their Gmail messages and search based on who the sender is, by entering the term FROM in the search or based on various words from the subject with the term SUBJECT, to display a list of messages that meet the search terms. But wouldn't it be useful if there was a way to directly locate the one and only message that interests them?
There is an alternative search trick by which the sender can actually help the recipient find a specific email they have sent them in the past.
When you send an email via Gmail, a unique message identifier is added to the header of that message, according to the RFC 822 specification. To see the message identifier for your message, open the email in Gmail, go to the menu by clicking on the 3 dots in the top right and from there select “Show Original”. A new tab will open in your browser. The unique message identifier (Message-ID) will appear in the first line of the header as in the photo below. In this case, the Message-ID is:
a2025cb18b12403a10ec0bb2f2adca70cbd8e776-10030322-100159012@google.com
The Message-ID of a particular email message is exactly the same for the sender and the recipient. This means that if the recipient opens the header of the email message in their mailbox, the Message-ID will match that of the same message from the sender's folder.
Gmail also offers a lesser-known search term – Rfc822msgid – that helps you search for emails based on Message-ID.
So, if your message ID is otidopote@mail.gmail.com , a simple search for Rfc8222msgid:otidiote@mail.gmail.com will return the exact email in the search results. Note that the search term Rfc8222msgid is written with a capital R and not with a lowercase R, as stated in the relevant Google help, since with a lowercase r it does not work for us.
And that's the trick. This search query will work for both the recipient and the sender of the email.
So if you pass the message ID to the recipient, they can simply use the Rfc822msgid term to locate that particular email in their mailbox. Or you can simply send them the full search term. In this case, the full search term is:
Rfc822msgid:a2025cb18b12403a10ec0bb2f2adca70cbd8e776-10030322-100159012@google.com
Since the Message-ID is very complicated, and your recipient may not understand what you are saying, you can simply search in your own Gmail, copy the URL of the Gmail search page and pass it to the recipient, asking them to simply run it. The URL will work for them too, since the Message-ID is the same for them. In our specific case the address is:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/Rfc822msgid%3Aa2025cb18b12403a10ec0bb2f2adca70cbd8e776-10030322-100159012%40google.com
