gmail searching - including the un-included

Nite Vizhun UV

proctological researcher
SoSH Member
Aug 30, 2002
4,646
Shakedown Street
I send out automated email invitations (for online surveys) for thousands of people at a time, usually entire school communities (students, staff, parents, etc). As you would expect, I get hundreds of emails that bounce back due to bad addresses, etc.

The bounced-back emails are usually from "Mail Delivery Subsystem" but the actual underlying address varies depending on where it's coming back from. I also get a lot from postmaster@[schooldomain].com.

After sending out a batch of invitations, and receiving a bunch of bounced-back messages, I search my email by school name (since I'm always running more than one school at a time) so I can pull all the bounced emails from a specific school and put together a report of failed emails for my contact person.

Since our company switched over to gmail, I can no longer properly search the bounced-back emails. I enter a search term in the search box that I know exists in the body of several bounced-back emails, but I might get only one bounced-back email in the search result.

When we first moved to gmail, these messages were getting caught by the spam filter. I set up filters to "never mark as spam" but it seems like maybe google is auto-filtering these bounce-back messages so that they don't appear in my search.

So my question is, is there something I can do to include the bounced-back messages in my search results?


tl;dr - I need to be able to include bounced-back emails in my search results so I can find all the bounced email addresses from a specific school, and google won't let me search the bounced-back emails. Is there a fix?
 

Nite Vizhun UV

proctological researcher
SoSH Member
Aug 30, 2002
4,646
Shakedown Street
Just tried it, and the bounce-backs appear if I search for just "in:all" but if I add a school name, or just one word from a school name (e.g. "in:all Nexus") I get nothing, and I should get at least a few dozen.
 

swiftaw

Member
SoSH Member
Jan 31, 2009
3,434
Can you access your map account via IMAP in a 3rd party client which has a robust search tool. For example, I access my gmail account via Apple Mail and then use Smart Mailboxes to keep various search results.