Google has added an extremely useful feature to Gmail which shows search results based on text that may be in the documents in your email attachments. Google has started indexing all email attachments in Gmail accounts and will use this data to provide relevant search results when someone searches for a particular text.
While Gmail already showed results from HTML and .txt files, the new improved search feature will be able to find text through many more file formats, including PDF, DOC, and PPT, which should come in very handy when you’re unable to remember a file name and just want Gmail to run a search through every attachment for a particular line of text and find the file for you.
Messages that have attachments can be found by searching for has:attachment and adding some search keywords along with it. Restricting search to a particular file type like PDF can be done by searching for has:attachment filename:pdf.Â
