Take the 2-minute tour ×

For archival purposes, I am storing a list of emails. I would like to be able to later find a particular message in my Gmail account. A unique message identifier is its Message-ID.

However Gmail does not allow searching for it (returns an empty result). I don't really understand why, since the ID is in the message text. So, is there a way to retrieve a message by its Message-ID in Gmail?

share|improve this question

migrated from superuser.com Oct 8 '12 at 12:45


2 Answers 2

up vote 13 down vote accepted

This is now possible.

Announced in a recent blog post, you can now use a bunch of new search operators, including RFC 822 message ID.

From Gmail Help - Using advanced search


Find a message by the message-id header

Example: rfc822msgid:20050329231145.62086.mail@mail.emailprovider.com


share|improve this answer

I use multiple labels on a single conversation.

One label refers to the subject/project and the 2nd label is simply titled "keep". When I need to find one of these important conversations, I just search for "label:projectx label:keep". The result is the small set of conversations that meet both requirements.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


