As time passes by Google has added some interesting features to it’s gmail service. Yesterday Google decides to add another in its search mail option. You were once only allowed to search for mail but now users can find attachments
Previously, you could only find an attachment if you searched for the message’s text, the filename, or its file type. Now, however, you can search for text within DOC, PDF, PPT, and other files and Gmail will bring them up in your search results. We tested it with a few PDF and DOC files, and it worked pretty well. It didn’t find every file we searched for, but note that Gmail is still indexing all these attachments, so your mileage may vary as the feature rolls out
Sure, you could find an attachment if you knew the filename or some keywords from the message. If someone sent you a text file or an HTML file, Gmail indexed its content, but Gmail couldn’t index PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and other popular attachment formats.
The good news is that Gmail has finally added support for searching inside attachments. I’ve just tested this feature for .pdf files, .doc documents, .ppt presentations and it works, even though some old attachments may not be indexed yet.
